January Thaw

January 10, 2008

But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. (Albert Camus)

This line from The Myth of Sisyphus came to me this morning as I gently tooled my golf cart down the rows of next year’s walnut seedlings. The sun feels fresh and a little strange on one’s face at this time of year, but it’s a pleasant strangeness. It indicates that the long night of November is finally over. After this thaw winter may bluster and blow, but we know that its anger is a ruse: whatever it throws at us will soon melt away because the sun is ascending more steeply each day. A look at the buds shows they are already much larger than they were last fall.

The melting snow has revealed the net of mouse-burrows which seem to have covered every square yard of the walnut fields, yet so far no saplings show signs of hurt.

The coyote’s footprints in the old snow are close together, with many small detours. He’s walking his route, paying careful attention to the activity below.

The huge wind yesterday took down a white ash on a fence-row below the house. This news provides an excuse for a visit to my neighbour, so I shoot down the road on my golf cart, drawing broad grins from the guys on the loading dock at Baker’s Feeds. They’re enjoying the sun this morning, as well. Grant Stone’s working on a chain saw’s carburetor, and seems inclined to take the tree for firewood as soon as the field is frozen enough to support a tractor, so I head out of the cozy workshop and make my way back up Young’s Hill.

The gods condemned Sisyphus to roll a rock up a hill for all of eternity. Camus insisted that Sisyphus’ rock, intended to be his punishment, was also his victory. In order for him to suffer the gods had to make him aware, and in his awareness came his victory. In those moments of quiet reflection as he walked down the hill to once again resume his pointless task, Sisyphus was happy.

I parked the cart. Inside the house my vacuum cleaner awaited me.

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Flying Carp and the fun of a sensational news story

January 5, 2008

A few years ago I wrote a novel for young adults in which a few mutant fish grew to enormous size and terrorized guides and their clients around Chaffey’s Locks. The villain of the piece was an eco-terrorist with an electron microscope and a tray of smallmouth bass eggs. The idea had come when a colleague explained to me how at the University of Guelph they routinely disabled the DNA strand which stopped the growth process in salmon embryos, then sat back to see how big the hatchlings could get. She showed me pictures of healthy salmon fry which weighed thirty times those in the control group. I had also found a newspaper article which recounted a similar experiment in New Zealand where researchers eventually became afraid of their salmon when they surpassed 750 kg, took on an ugly green hue and sprouted hugely distorted lumps on their skulls. The researchers destroyed them all when an autopsy on one revealed that the creatures were fertile. The kids and parents who read the book thought it was fun, if a bit far-fetched, but it turns out I couldn’t make up anything half as wild as the stories which have appeared in prominent Canadian newspapers, Maclean’s Magazine, on CBC news and even the Internet about the latest threat sweeping up the Mississippi watershed and lurking in the fish markets of Toronto and Ottawa.

The monsters of the hour are silver and big-head carp, imported to the United States from Asia in the 1970’s to clear catfish ponds and sewage lagoons of algae. The myth holds that flooding of the Mississippi in the ‘90s released many of the voracious fish from captivity. This summer The Toronto Star’s Peter Gorrie reported that the silver and bighead carp “now make up more than 95 per cent, by weight, of all the animal matter in parts of the Mississippi system (Toronto Star, May 20, 2007).” Becky Cudmore, research biologist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, reported that nine out of ten fish they sampled in the Illinois River were Asian carp (London Free Press, July 27, 2007).

A counterpoint came immediately from Duane C. Chapman, USGS Fisheries Biologist, when he saw my blog entry and sent along a much more sensible perspective on the carp infestation. He told me that an individual net may very well haul out all carp, but that doesn’t mean that the river is full of them. He sent me some census statistics that showed very few carp in the system even though the commercial harvest of silver and bighead carp was expanding exponentially at the time. He explained that a lot depends upon where you look and the type of net you use. Chapman made it clear that the 95% statistic is a wild exaggeration.

No one questions, however, the silver carp’s reputation for bizarre behaviour: when startled by an outboard motor the fish leap up to eight feet out of the water, often landing in the boat. YouTube has a number of videos of this spectacular activity. Internet clips of tourists getting shelled by large silver fish are fun to watch, but I certainly wouldn’t want it to happen on Newboro Lake. In one of the USGS publications which I read the author commented that the leaping fish have made it prohibitively dangerous to water ski on the Illinois River. He likened impact from leaping fish to getting hit by bowling balls at random intervals. The Lacey Act (2006) itself refers to the tremendous leaping power of the silver carp creating a hazard for boaters and fishermen.

At some point in Chicago’s checkered past engineers dug a canal to divert sewage south to the Mississippi in an attempt to lessen pollution levels in Lake Michigan. Thus the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Watershed are connected by the Illinois River. For years the untreated runoff from meat processing plants and heavy industries protected Lake Michigan from the carp invasion through the Chicago canal, but now the EPA has forced polluters to clean up their act, allowing the carp a non-toxic route north.

At the moment all that stands in the way of a fully-blown invasion is a system of electrodes rigged across the canal to deter the fish. Imagine one of those invisible fences for your dog. Commercial tugs still move barges through this canal, so the water carried in the vessels’ bilges is a major threat to the the Great Lakes. You may recall that zebra mussels hitched a ride from the Adriatic in the bilges of freighters a few years ago.

Even scarier are older news stories still current on the Internet. One reports an Asian carp caught in the St. Clair River by a commercial fisherman, but spookiest of all is the report that bighead carp are available live in fish markets in Ottawa and Toronto. (Zev Singer, The Ottawa Citizen, Thursday, March 13, 2003). The Ontario Government quickly banned the live sale of carp in 2004, and required that only sterile carp be allowed live into the country.

Duane Chapman explained that The Lacey Act in 2006 added the silver carp and the large-scaled silver carp to its list of injurious wildlife species, thus banning the transportation of the fish across state lines or out of the country. The act bans both diploid and triploid versions of the fish, but Chapman pointed out that there is no such thing as a triploid (genetically sterile) silver or bighead carp. Only for the very different grass carp have scientists developed a sterile variant. Still, with the ban stopping the traffic from Arkansas to Ontario, the odds of a live adult silver carp hopping out of a tank and into the Rideau River are very low.

But the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources reports another disturbing trend: fully half of minnow buckets are dumped back into the lake at the end of fishing trips, and a carp fry looks very much like any of its cousins in the minnow family.

Chapman emphatically agrees on this point: “These fish are easy to transport in a bait bucket, as are many other undesirable fish, and diseases. Wild-caught bait should never, ever, be used in a body of water other than where it was captured, whether you release your bait afterward or not. Purchased bait should not be released alive.”

The reason for the alarm is that these species of carp have a reputation for eating their way through the entire ecosystem of a lake. The only disagreement has to do with how quickly they can do it. The papers this year have claimed that a female silver or bighead can lay one or two million eggs at a hatch. (The Lacey Act offers a more modest figure of 400,000 eggs for a large female.) They reach spawning maturity early, and they compete relentlessly with native species. Chapman’s current research concerns the analysis of how much damage the silver and bighead carp have done to the areas they have invaded.

“I have data … that shows that zooplankton populations in the low velocity habitats used by bighead and silver carps (together, known as the “bigheaded carps”) are MUCH lower than prior to the invasion. These things do not bode well for native fishes, especially fishes that require the same habitats as bigheaded carps and that are planktivorous throughout their life (like paddlefish, bigmouth buffalo, and the important preyfish gizzard shad). But we have not yet been totally overrun by these fish to the loss of all our native fish. Our primary sportfish here in the Missouri River is catfish, and the catfishing is still world class. Time will tell what we see in the future. Predictions are tough, although risk assessments on these fish are uniform in the opinion that it would be risky to have these fish invade.”

Perhaps Maclean’s writer Danylo Hawaleshka exceeded the mark last summer when he wrote “The barbarian is at the gate!” but the message is clear to the fishermen of Ontario: if you don’t want to get shelled by flying carp, take great care with your minnow bucket.

References:

Correspondence with Duane C. Chapman, Research Fisheries Biologist, United States Geological Service, Columbia Environmental Research Center, January, 2008.

Peter Gorrie, The Toronto Star, Gluttony, thy name is Asian Carp, May 20, 2007

http://ottawariverkeeper.ca/news/invasive_asian_carp_sold_alive_in_ottawa_fish_markets/

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Science/2007/0…373151-sun.html

Click to access SAR-AS2005_001_e.pdf

http://www.macleans.ca/article.jsp?content=20060417_125346_125346

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The Battle of Apple Hill

December 28, 2007


Irwin Smythe drove his Cadillac down the ramp one Friday evening in early August, got out, slammed the door and stalked down the dock without a look at anyone. Every ounce of his 340 pounds radiated outrage. He had the bearing of a man, not just angry, but on the verge of a heart attack.

After a while, the groceries and his wife Eleanor stowed aboard their houseboat, Irwin took the car back up to the parking lot and made his way back down to the porch, where he unloaded his tale of woe.

Irwin and Eleanor had bought this bass boat, one with a zillion horsepower, a trolling motor, and enough electronics to knock out a submarine. He had rented an extra slip for it at the marina, so that it would always be ready for them to use. But Irwin hadn’t finished at this point. He decided that the sun was too hot for Eleanor when they were fishing, so he had a bimini top built for the boat, with special supports to hold the shade in place at the 70 miles per hour the thing could do.

Irwin wanted only the best, and this went for tackle and bait, as well. He tried all of the catalogue specials, and they had worked reasonably well throughout the month of July, but August bass wanted frogs, and so Irwin gave up on artificials in favour of the real thing. He even modified one of the wells on the boat to make a vivarium for frogs. Though he killed them before he put them on a hook, up to that time Irwin’s frogs lived in air-conditioned comfort in his black, metal-flake, Ranger bass boat.

Notwithstanding his expensive equipment, Irwin got his frogs the same way the rest of us did, by catching them in the parking lot. None of Irwin’s high-tech toys paid off like his two-dollar butterfly net. With his bulk, Irwin needed the net to catch the frogs, but with it he proved a crafty and successful frogger.

The bass had been biting, and the parking lot was running temporarily short of frogs. Irwin decided that there was some nice moist grass a couple of miles down the road, in a rural suburb known as Apple Hill. Irwin vaguely knew the developer from his real estate dealings, so he got the fellow’s number from his secretary, and had a word with him on his car-phone about his bait-supply problem. The developer told Irwin to go ahead and send his crew over to pick frogs.

Irwin’s “crew” this Friday afternoon had consisted of one man, Irwin, still in a white shirt and tie, but with tennis shoes and a pair of fluorescent green Bermuda shorts. Eleanor chose to relax in the idling Cadillac with the air conditioning set at glacial and the CD player whispering Vivaldi.

Irwin had removed one of his socks when he changed his shoes, because we had taught him that the most efficient and humane way to transport frogs was in a woollen sock, slightly dampened. (The wool wicks the moisture off, thereby cooling the frogs and keeping them more comfortable.) Eleanor’s bottle of Perrier lay empty and abandoned on the hood of the car.

Mrs. Emily Penney was returning from an expedition to a craft store in Westport, thinking half about her new garden sculpture by Doef, and half about what to serve her future son-in-law for tomorrow’s dinner when she encountered, parked on the grass at the approach to her home, an idling, white Cadillac. A large, dishevelled man with a butterfly net, ludicrous trousers and one sock, was hopping around her lawn, waving the net at what appeared to be pieces of clover, then pouncing, only to come up with delight clutching a small, quivering object, which he would promptly thrust deep into the bowels of an executive-length sock, tie the sock, and repeat the process.

Mrs. Penney watched this for some moments, then, realizing that the pursued were frogs, rather than some sort of loathsome insect, decided that she must do her part to save the wetlands of Ontario. She drove up behind the idling Cadillac, shut off her Subaru, and slammed the door behind her as she strode to confront this intruder.

This broke Irwin’s concentration, and he looked up with annoyance after missing a nice green leopard.

“Those are my frogs.”

“What?” Irwin asked.

“I said, those are my frogs. This is my property, and those are my frogs. Would you please leave?”

“Lady, I just talked to the developer, Stan Miller, on my car phone on the way through Portland, and this lot is still for sale. You don’t own it, the corporation does.”

“Those are still my frogs.”

“How can they be your frogs? They’re not on your land, I’m not on your land, and the frogs are all jumping into the ditch as we speak. Now what’s your problem?”

“Those frogs have grown up in Apple Hill. I live in Apple Hill. We are fellow residents, and we are not about to have you hooligans from a campground come over here to traipse around our lawns with butterfly nets.” Mrs. Penny ran out of breath at about the same time that she ran out of invective, and so subsided with a puff. We could imagine Irwin’s face turning from pink, to red, to bluish black. Perhaps he remembered to breathe in time, because we hadn’t heard any ambulances.

Anyway, Irwin backed down, with little grace, one might guess, still clutching a half-dozen spotted hostages. Her voice rang out once more: “Give me back my frogs. You may not kidnap them to use for your purposes.” Irwin clutched the sock to his chest, climbed into his car, and backed out to the road in a cloud of dust. Mrs. Penney, satisfied that she had done her bit for the environment and all of the loathsome creatures in it, drove her Subaru in triumph the remaining fifty feet to her driveway.

We felt badly for Irwin, and a little frightened for his health. This was the angriest we had ever seen him, and he normally had blood pressure that a giraffe would respect.

So we hid our smiles and started a discussion about who owned the frogs. Bloody-minded crew that we were, we could find no one to argue the Apple Hill side, so we decided to ask for a judicial review.

Out of Irwin’s earshot we approached His Worship, Justin Paul with the facts of the case, and asked him for a judgement. Jack did a creditable job of describing how Irwin must have appeared chasing frogs with a butterfly net, and Justin had a hard time containing his mirth, especially when Jack, an unconscious mimic, re-created both sides of Irwin’s dialogue with Mrs. Penney. Finally, the judge announced his intention to consider this in chambers, and went off to his boat for an afternoon nap.

A few days later, Justin announced that he was prepared to deliver his judgement on the case of Smythe versus Penney. We all gathered round and His Worship began:

“In Ancient England there were common lands where the villagers could graze their cattle on the grass, and take them home to milk later. The precedent for this case comes from the ancient English common law which governed the possession of cattle and other livestock ranging upon the common land.

“Mrs. Penney’s claim to the frogs depends entirely upon the state of mind of each frog at the time of the dispute. Before the law there are two possible states of mind for an animal: animus fruendi, and animus revertendi, that is, the impulse to flee, or the impulse to come to its owner, when called. The villagers proved ownership of their livestock by calling their animals off the common.

“Mrs. Penney does, indeed, own the frogs. All she has to do is call them. Any and all of the frogs which come when she calls them, belong to her. If they do not come when she calls them, or if they flee at her approach, they are fair game for anyone else on the common.”

We greatly admired this judgement, particularly his informed use of Latin, but by now Irwin had cooled down, was catching bass on surface plugs, and Eleanor thought it probably would be best not to disturb him with the news. Still, we liked the ring of animus revertendi, and we still talk about the Battle of Apple Hill.

Copyright, Rod Croskery, 1995

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1976 Ski-Doo Alpine

December 23, 2007

This morning I decided it was time to start up the old Ski-Doo Alpine and back it out of the barn. The problem which has reduced its usage these last few years has been a series of weak priming pumps which wouldn’t work when dried out. I solved the problem today with the oil-extracting gizmo my friend Tony bought last summer at Princess Auto. When pumped, the large plastic cylinder creates a powerful vacuum which can be used for a variety of things more interesting than draining the oil from a marine engine.

A month ago it extracted standing water from two copper pipes I needed to solder in a wall cavity. This time I hooked it to the carburetor side of the primer on the Alpine and started to pump. The dry lines resisted for a while, but then fuel started to shoot around the transparent tubing and the day was won. Of course the Alpine started right up once primed. I backed it out into the snow-covered barnyard without incident.

Then I tried to shift into forward. No such luck. Neutral was as far forward as the gearshift would go. Not wanting to do all of my season’s snowmobiling in reverse, I took the hood off and had a look. It turned out to be a linkage problem left over from the time I broke the shifter (and two ribs) on an adventure on Scott Island and had had Larry Sargent weld it on the way home. After a bit of creative bending it reassembled with the proper clearances to shift well.

The next hour went into carburetor adjustments. This involved many loops around the barnyard and adjoining field. Eventually the engine ran strongly, so I headed back to the woods to investigate Mom’s report of trespassers on snow machines the night before last. Turns out the only tracks I could find were from the resident coyote and a few squirrels, but if another snow-mobiler should decide to follow my tracks, he’ll soon regret it. Last winter’s loggers left me with a trail through the southern quadrant with bends I can barely navigate with a golf cart. On a twin-track vintage snowmobile they are plain impossible. Several times I had to back and fill in the deep snow in order to make my way through. In one section I gave up and bashed through the undergrowth. It takes a sturdy 3″ tree to deflect an Alpine and substantially more than that to stop it. I wouldn’t care to follow that track on a conventional machine with twin skis.

Carefully avoiding last year’s cherry and oak seedlings, I ricocheted my way through the new trails and gratefully rejoined the track in the more open section of the property.

Man, is driving that machine hard work! The pull cord on a 640 Rotax engine is a challenge when cold, a near-impossibility when warm. Even turning the front ski requires about all I can manage. Enjoying legroom on the long seat is out of the question: if I don’t perch right on top of the engine the thing won’t turn at all. The first launch off a snow drift each year once again reminds me that legs have an important job in protecting the rest of the body from spine-crunching impacts on an old machine sprung for heavy loads.

It didn’t take long to burn a quarter-tank of gas, but by then I was soaking wet from sweat and ready for a nap. What a workout! The Alpine’s all set for another year of trail maintenance around the farm. I’m not so sure my body is ready for the machine, though.

(Note: For some reason this is one of the more popular articles on this site, so I added a second part to it yesterday. You’ll find it under the category “Offroading” in the directory. Rod)

(5 January, 2009:  The Alpine figures prominently in The Heroic Winter Assault on Schooner Island, also in this blog.)

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Letter to The Toronto Star: Whose job is it to protect the fish?

December 14, 2007

Mr. Urquhart, Ms. Doolittle, Mr. Rush:

I grew up in Westport, a small tourist community just north of Kingston, Ontario. Throughout my childhood my favourite pastime was fishing off the many docks and bridges around the village. The Department of Lands and Forests had its headquarters in Westport as well, and everyone knew the rules: don’t keep undersized bass, clean and eat what you catch, and most of all, NEVER EVEN THINK of dropping a line into the Fish Sanctuary. The Pond, as the sanctuary is known locally, houses the breeding stock for the local fish hatchery run by the Ministry of Natural Resources.

Imagine my amazement when at a grade-eight reunion this summer a classmate, now a member of the Westport Town Council, told me how town residents have been unable to do anything about van-loads of men coming into town after dark and fishing all night in the sanctuary, keeping everything they catch. Jackie Brady told me that repeated calls to the Ministry of Natural Resources did not produce any enforcement activity because, in her words, “They couldn’t afford the overtime.”

Then an incident involving locals and Asian fishermen from Toronto hit the front page of The Star last summer and was reported as a hate crime. I sent in a correction at that time, hoping that further investigation would produce a more balanced look at the situation, but no one responded.
This week in my blog I included a couple of excerpts from the annual report of the Auditor-General of Ontario. The report states unequivocally on p. 153 that conservation officers are unable to work nights unless authorized to do so by their superiors (See two blog entries down from this one). This is consistent with what Jackie told me. One issue, then, is the absence of conservation officers at the time that the fishermen seem to prefer to participate in their sport.

Another issue may well have to do with language. The earlier report’s quotations were translated from Mandarin, according to the article. No mention was made of the fishermen’s understanding of the regulations, or even if they held valid fishing licenses. Are Westport residents to be condemned as racist if night-time visitors ignore the rules, trespass and litter, and systematically plunder the lifeblood of the community? Ignorance of the language and the laws is no justification for poaching, and yet Toronto journalists don’t seem to look much further than that dreadful phrase involving wet Japanese to find a headline.

I’ll close with a little personal anecdote. On an October Sunday this year I ran around Indian Lake a bit in my boat to see if I could find a splake. Nothing was happening so I docked at the upper side of Chaffey’s Lock and walked over the embankment to an area below the mill where the current runs out into Opinicon Lake. An Asian man who was fishing off the point on the other side of the canal took one look at me and quickly left the area. I noticed that his line held a distinctive orange bobber. The fish weren’t biting below the lock and I soon returned to my boat.

Five days later I walked down the point to fish from shore. I caught a nice splake and carried it up the bank to a flat spot. At that point I noticed a very expensive G. Loomis spinning rod, neatly disassembled and held together with elastic bands, lying in a juniper bush. The distinctive orange bobber was still on the line. I picked up the rod and took it home for safekeeping.

Before this gets reported as a racist attack I’d better specify that the young Asian man in question was tall and very fit. I’m fiftyish and short, gray-haired. My friends suggested that the only thing frightening about me might have been my green rain suit and Tilley hat. The man might have mistaken me for a conservation officer and abandoned his gear.

G. Loomis spinning rods are valuable, but I’m a bait-casting fan and have no use for it. I’d be glad to return the rod to the man who abandoned it. All he has to do is show me his fishing license.

Ms. Doolittle’s article in today’s _Star_ is obviously the cause of this note. Once again it looks at the fishing issue from a racial perspective. I’d suggest from a lifetime of angling around Westport that there may well be a better-reasoned way to address the facts as you have them, starting with the shocking lack of resources provided to conservation officers to do their jobs. Please read the Auditor-General’s Report, Enforcement Activity, pp. 151-153.

Thank you for your time and attention,

Yours sincerely,

Rod Croskery

UPDATE: December 20, 2007

Check out Marco Smits’ series on this issue in The Review-Mirror at

http://www.review-mirror.com/

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The Heartnut Buzz Begins

December 12, 2007

Nut fanciers might wish to check out Ron Eade’s article in the food section (E1) of The Ottawa Citizen today. He interviews a chocolatier about heartnuts.

Now if Robin Lee would only decide to market a walnut cracker in the Lee Valley Tools Christmas Catalogue next year, the stage would be set for the growth of Heartnuts and native Black Walnuts as viable gourmet choices on the Canadian market.

http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/food/story.html?id=60327175-13f8-4967-b8e5-f6a5e4501cef&p=1

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Ontario Fish and Wildlife Program Audit: Enforcement

December 11, 2007

As you may recall the issue of illegal night fishing created a storm in Westport this summer after The Toronto Star reported as a hate crime a confrontation between local residents and a group of Asian fishermen from Toronto.

Earlier in the summer Westport Councillor Jackie Brady told me that repeated calls to the Ministry of Natural Resources to complain about vanloads of men fishing at night in the Westport Fish Sanctuary met with no success as the MNR claimed not to have the budget to respond to such calls.

It turns out her contact at the Ministry was right. This week the Ontario Auditor General reported the following on p. 153:

The majority of conservation officers work eight-hour shifts that normally conclude before six in the evening, and there are generally few overnight shifts. According to ministry staff, most public complaints during the night do not need immediate attention, even though almost 20% of the calls to the Ministry’s TIPS reporting hotline occur during overnight hours. We were informed that enforcement staff cannot respond to complaints in off hours without supervisory approval because the costs of overtime must be balanced with the severity of the complaint and concerns about staff safety. We were also informed that extensive off-hours work could diminish the staff’s ability to carry out regular day patrols. However, failure to respond to complaints on a timely basis may increase the risk of illegal activity going undetected.

On p. 151 under Enforcement Activity the article makes the following points:

The Minstry allocates operational support funding to the Enforcement Branch that averages approximately $9,000 per conservation officer to carry out field-enforcement activities. From our review of the enforcement activities in the districts that we visited, and discussions with enforcement supervisors and officers, we noted the following:

– For the four units reviewed, the funds budgeted were insufficient to carry out the planned enforcement activities…. As a result, conservation officer patrol hours had been reduced from planned levels by between 15% and 60%…. If there was a shortfall in funding, district offices were not allowed to reallocate funds from other activities to the enforcement units, as was the case in prior years.

-For the enforcement units reviewed, conservation officers were unable to carry out additional harvest monitoring because of resource constraints. In this regard they were restricted to spending between $75 and $125 a week for operating costs such as meals, gas, vehicle repairs and maintenance, and travel. At this level of funding, we noted that conservation officers carried out regular patrols an average of one or two days a week during the 2006/7 fiscal year, compared to an average three or four days a week the previous fiscal year. In the case of one unit, we noted that regular patrols were suspended by mid-November 2006 for lack of funds, even though the deer hunting season still had another 10 days to run.

If the Government of Ontario won’t provide the resources to protect our fishing, and even handcuffs its enforcement personnel with draconian rules, then whose job is it to keep order?

The Toronto Star picked up on the Auditor-General’s comment that new drivers with a driver’s education certificate were 62% more likely to be involved in a collision than those without the certificate, but sadly they ignored Fish and Wildlife issues.

http://www.auditor.on.ca/en/reports_en/en07/306en07.pdf

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Hawks and Doves

December 7, 2007

A central metaphor from my teenage years was the conflict between hawks and doves. Hawks favoured the bombing of Cambodia. Doves resisted the draft. That the doves eventually won came as quite a surprise to me.

 

Several decades later retirement has led me to revisit the hawks vs doves question on a more literal level. A young red-tail hung around the farm this summer. Zeke is all a hawk should be. Physically beautiful, majestic in manner, aloof, fierce, predatory – Zeke is one cool bird. All he has to do is fly over his domain to make all lesser creatures acutely aware of his presence.

 

Then there’s Winny, the mourning dove who visits my mother’s feeder each day. She has lovely soft beige feathers, a graceful silhouette, and a charming voice. Winnie roosts under the deck and seems the most agreeable of birds…until it comes to food.

 

The local grackles are a pushy lot, but they’ve almost given up trying to boot Winny off the dish of sunflower seeds before she is ready. She sits right in the dish and ignores their efforts to intimidate her. An occasional grackle tries to drive her away from the food with sharp pecks. Winnie simply absorbs the punishment and keeps eating. Perhaps rattled by her markings, which look as though she has eyes in the back of her head, the grackle flies off without food.

 

It’s a much different situation with Zeke, who has learned to panic at the sight of these same grackles, flying well over the horizon just to rid his tail of the pest-of-the-day. Obviously if Zeke caught up with Winny he’d have a nice meal, but when a third player enters things turn around sharply. Grackles seem more intimidated by Winny’s passive-aggressive attitude than by Zeke’s hawkish one.

 

So what’s the point? Possession of talons and great strength have value only if your intended victim can’t out-manoevre you, but sitting down in the food dish can make everyone else go hungry. It’s dumb to mess with that kind of power.

Advantage: Doves.

 

 

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Trees Marching North

December 4, 2007

The Ottawa Citizen today had an article suggesting that before long we’ll have sugar maples growing on the shores of Hudson Bay.

If the Carolina forest continues to march north as a result of climate change, my little black walnuts may find themselves well-situated to take advantage of the balmier weather.

Can pecans and almonds be far behind?

The press release from which Randy Boswell compiled the Citizen article is attached below.

If you’re up to reading a 10 page PDF file, the following report goes into detail. The maps on page 8 look like something from a John Wyndam novel. Let me put it this way: my friend’s walnut tree in Reading PA is in a lot of trouble.

http://www.aibs.org/bioscience-press-releases/resources/12-07.pdf

————————————————————-

Public release date: 3-Dec-2007
Contact: Jennifer Williams
jwilliams@aibs.org
202-628-1500
American Institute of Biological Sciences

Climate change predicted to drive trees northward

Ranges may decrease sharply if trees cannot disperse in altered conditions

The most extensive and detailed study to date of 130 North American tree species concludes that expected climate change this century could shift their ranges northward by hundreds of kilometers and shrink the ranges by more than half. The study, by Daniel W. McKenney of the Canadian Forest Service and his colleagues, is reported in the December issue of BioScience.

McKenney’s study is based on an extensive data-gathering effort and thus more comprehensive than studies based on published range maps. It includes data from Canada as well as from the United States. Observations of where trees are found are used to define the “climate envelope” of each species.

If the trees were assumed to respond to climate change by dispersing their progeny to more favorable locations, McKenney and colleagues found, ranges of the studied species would move northward by some 700 kilometers and decrease in size by an average of 12 percent (with some increasing while others decreased). If the species were assumed unable to disperse, the average expected range shift was 320 kilometers, and “drastic” range reductions of 58 percent were projected. The authors believe that most species will probably fall somewhere between these two extremes of ability to disperse.

The climate measures studied were chosen to represent important gradients for plants: heat and moisture. Two climate change scenarios were modeled. One assumed that carbon dioxide emissions would start to decrease during the coming century, the other that they would continue to increase. Each scenario was investigated with three well-known models of global climate, with broadly similar results. The authors note that their study investigated only a sample of the 700 or so tree species in North America, and that under climate change, new species might colonize the southern part of the continent from tropical regions. A companion article by the same authors provides more detail about their climate envelope method as applied to one species, the sugar maple.

Posted by rodcros
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Golf Carts in Winter

November 24, 2007

A good golf cart can go head-to-head with an ATV in summer and win most rounds. In the winter it’s a different story. Although my machines have made many epic voyages on the frozen lakes (and occasionally snowmobile tracks), everyone will admit that the golf cart is not designed for winter.

My first machine, a Yamaha G1, had a reversible 2 cycle engine, so it started and ran well regardless of the temperature. Various bits would ice up, though, and require a defroster hose run from the tailpipe of my truck to the underside of the cart. With snowtires it had traction to rival a VW Beetle, though, so I got into lots of mischief with it.

A 2 cycle EZ-Go had a transmission whose cable would freeze, so it worked as long as you wanted to go forward.

When those two died I went with some trepidation to a four cycle EZ-Go. The first two winters with it were a write-off, as it would start fine and then starve for gas as it warmed up and not revive until the next thaw. Then on the Buggies Unlimited Forum last winter EZ-Go Mike, a contributor from Minnesota, told me the problem lay in the hose that runs from the crankcase to the fuel pump. Seems each piston stroke fires an impulse through the tube to power the fuel pump. He told me if I re-routed the hose so as to leave no place for moisture to accumulate, there’d be no more ice blockages shutting down the cart. After several tries I managed to twist the hose just right, and now it starts and runs fine in the cold weather.

The 4 ply trailer tires I use on the cart are useless in snow or mud, so today was the day for the winter tires. On they went and out I went to play, though to be truthful the snow was a little too deep for the EZ-Go. I had to stay on the flats or face a walk home.

Few things in life are as much fun as driving a VW Beetle over frozen snow into areas where one should not go. One of my old stories deals with this impulse: http://www.a1.nl/phomepag/markerink/vwbeetle.htm

A golf cart offers much the same sensations, though dulled somewhat. But then I’m not as keen on long walks home as I used to be.

UPDATE: When Charlie and his pal Shiva hit the farm on Christmas Day with bags of camera equipment and mischief in mind, the EZ-Go received quite a workout. They drove/pushed it through a foot of snow back to the woodlot, then mounted a remote-controlled camera outboard for some stunting shots. http://gallery.shivamayer.com/d/2599-1/20071225-161921.jpg

Posted by rodcros
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