The Homestead

About a mile south of the house are the remains of an old homestead built more than a hundred years ago. Dr. G and the Professor, with help from their dogs, horses and kids, have worn a serviceable trail out to the homestead over the twenty years they've been here. Even with their kids grown and gone, the G's and their dogs still make regular trips to the homestead. Their Newfoundland has treed more than one bear on that trail.

Mr. T and I have hiked out there several times as well. This weekend was balmy and sunny, and in accordance with the arrival of spring, we set out for the homestead with boots instead of snowshoes. We even put a dog pack on Alaska, to introduce her to the accessories required for her new life as a trail dog. The weather was glorious and warm, and The Kid abandoned his shirt after about twenty minutes.

Almost nothing of the original homestead remains except some grizzled old apple trees that still dutifully bear fruit every year. The trunks of these trees have been scored every which way by bear claws, but still they stand. At first I wondered whether the trees were contemporaneous with the homestead, because this would have made them quite old indeed. But then I read that apple trees can live to quite advanced ages.

The homestead is situated near the rear edge of a natural meadow ringed with aspens, larches and other evergreens, and with a clear view of the Cabinet Mountain range. The property was acquired by a lumber company long ago, and the surrounding area was logged two years ago. The lumber operation left piles and piles of discarded tree trunks, and the logging trucks carved deep tracks that still linger in the grasses. But the homestead is still and silent again, except for the twittering of the birds.

The meadow must have looked different in the heyday of the homestead -- the trees were no doubt older and taller, for one thing -- but the fundamentals are probably the same. Elk bed down here now, and the bears, of course, have broadcast their presence on the trees. Coyotes, driven off an adjoining mountain by a newly established wolf pack, traipse back and forth across the meadow and the trail, discarding bones and other pieces-parts along the path.

Looking out at the mountain range, I had a sense of what a felicitous place this would have been to locate a home in the late nineteenth century. Game would have been abundant. The home site was two miles away from the brand new railroad and the town growing up around it. The seasonal stream at the edge of the meadow offered water, and the river in the valley would have been thick with trout and, during part of the year, chinook salmon. Huckleberries grew on the mountain. And then there were the apple trees. The winters would have been harsh, and along with the abundant game would be grizzly bears and mountain lions. But if they could deal with the cold and the predators, this was as good a spot as any to make a go of it.

I wonder what happened to the people who lived here, and their house.

A day may come, very soon, when another home -- and another, and another -- is built in this idyllic meadow. The whispers in town are that the logging done on the surrounding forest was a "real estate cut." Plans have apparently been drawn for big houses on large lots. I worry, as always, about the animals, but particularly the bears. They need the space. The Professor and Dr. G have 130 acres that surround our paltry six, and they care about the wildlife -- The Professor thinned some forest last year but made sure to leave enough thick passages for the bears. But further fragmentation of habitat can only drive them further into the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness, away from people. Always away. And then my own habitat becomes more sterile as the chances of seeing bears on the road I now share with them diminish ever further.

The dire real estate market has likely given the wildlife of the homestead a reprieve. This town has never really bustled, even during the most prosperous of times. As The Professor says, the best thing about this town is that it has so little to offer. And with the amount of housing stock languishing on the market, it seems unlikely that anyone would invest in this little corner of the world. But time and "progress" march inexorably on.

And I worry about the bears.

Double Take

How often do you get to read a bit like this in the news:

After a lengthy fight in the Capitol and with residents on the coast, a public-private partnership to remake state-owned Jekyll Island has backed away from plans to place hotels and condos on a massive parking lot that for decades has given Georgia vacationers access to a popular beach.

Instead, the acreage will be changed to include a park and an environmental conservation center, the latter originally planned for elsewhere on the island. The condos and hotels will be relocated.

That last paragraph is the one that really makes my head spin.

Via this Kos diarist, whose work on this issue I began following recently.

Update: Here is the link to her primary blog.

Earth Hour

Tonight.

The answer for what ails us all: sidewalks

What is it with this country? Why is the thoughtful placement of those technological stumpers called sidewalks apparently beyond our ken?

I'm a coffee addict. I've been cold-brewing my joe lately, which is just as well since my coffee maker carafe busted last week. Well, for a variety of reasons, most of them related to my own personal failures, I'm out of cold-brewed coffee extract. So I decided to grab a cup from one of those teeny little espresso stands near the gas station just outside my neighborhood.

I walked. Because it would have been absurd to get into a car to go there. It is impossible to overstate how short this walk is, people, and how easy it should have been. But I found myself picking my way through a muddy field just to avoid taking my chances on the busy road that would have taken me to Microscopic Espresso Stand had I been silly enough to climb into my car to go there. There is an overwhelming sense, when you try to walk somewhere in settings like this, that you are some sort of vagabond operating outside the bounds of social acceptability.

Bill Bryson said this in A Walk in the Woods:

It was a warm afternoon, and it felt wonderful -- you can't believe how wonderful -- to be at large without a pack, bouncy and unburdened. With a pack you walk at a tilt, hunched and pressed forward, your eyes on the ground. You trudge; it is all you can do. Without, you are liberated. You walk erect. You look around. You spring. You saunter. You amble.

Or at least you do for four blocks. Then you come to a mad junction at Burger King and discover that the new six-lane road to Kmart is long, straight, very busy, and entirely without facilities for pedestrians -- no sidewalks, no pedestrian crossings, no central refuges, no buttons to push for a WALK signal at lively intersections. I walked through the gas station and motel forecourts and across restaurant parking lots, clambered over concrete barriers, crossed lawns, and pushed through neglected ranks of privet or honeysuckle at property boundaries. At bridges over creeks and culverts -- and goodness me how developers love a culvert -- I had no choice but to walk on the road, pressed against the dusty railings and causing less attentive cars to swerve to avoid me. Four times I was honked at for having the temerity to proceed through town without benefit of metal. One bridge was so patently dangerous that I hesitated at it. The creek it crossed was only a reedy trickle, narrow enough to step across, so I decided to go that way. I slid and scampered down the bank, found myself in a hidden zone of sucking grey mud, pitched over twice, hauled myself up the other side, pitched over again, and emerged at length streaked and speckled with mud and extravagantly decorated with burrs. When I finally reached the Kmart Plaza I discovered that I was on the wrong side of the road and had to dash through six lanes of hostile traffic. By the time I crossed the parking lot and stepped into the air-conditioned, Muzak-happy world of Kmart I was as grubby as if I had been on the trail, and trembling all over.

The Kmart, it turned out, didn't stock insect repellent.

Sidewalks, friends. If communities were intelligently connected with a reliable network of sidewalks, imagine the problems solved. Less gas consumed, and less carbon expelled. Fewer of us dropping dead of heart attacks and strokes. Fewer pedestrian fatalities. Greater feelings of well-being.

Tell me not of how this goes against the interests of the establishment. I know that already; if sidewalks put money into the pockets of the oligarchs, I wouldn't be able to swing a cat without hitting one. I have a radical suggestion -- probably the exact sort of thing that got my Dad accused of being a Communist sympathizer by one of his grade school teachers in the 40s: Let's structure society around what's good for ordinary folks just trying to get their hands on a little bit of coffee in the morning. What say?

Help the googlers find organic Christmas trees

Given recent google queries, it may be time to rerun last year's post about pesticides and Christmas trees (complete with video showing neat but carbon-intensive means of harvesting.) I've only had time to do a little bit of update research, but as far as I can tell, organic Christmas trees are still as rare as they were last year. My organic Christmas tree will be a small tree that needs to be cleared from my yard in Montana to create defensible fire space, but not everyone has an overage of conifers in their front yard.

Anyone have any leads for your area? Drop them in the comments, please. (And if you want to poll your readers for leads, it would be really nice to have something to offer the googlers.)

Here's a page with a few sources.

Baby sloths and oil spills: from the sublime to the ridiculous

Photo by and courtesy of Mila Zinkova under a GNU Free Documentation License

Michael is on fire today with the links, having sent me two interesting stories this weekend. First he directs me to the San Francisco oil spill, in which tens of thousands of gallons of heavy fuel were spilled into San Francisco Bay when a container ship struck a tower on Wednesday.

One of the more disturbing aspects is this:

As scientist worried about the future of the region's wildlife, authorities questioned the Coast Guard's response in the hours after the spill.

More than 12 hours after the incident, Coast Guard officials were still saying just 140 gallons (530 liters) had leaked, according to Mayor Gavin Newsom, who said the city would consider legal action against anyone found liable.

"We would have responded differently if we had accurate information from the get-go," Newsom spokesman Nathan Ballard said.

City workers, for instance, would have initially laid more boom lines to contain the oil, he said.

Nice.

Todd Woody at Green Wombat also takes a hard look at the process for managing volunteers in the wake of this mess and finds it stuck firmly in the 20th century. Everyone in charge of this would be served to read that post.

Now on to this unbelievably cute sloth. Could that little dude BE any cuter?

Okay, just a little more plastic

The Great Plastic Challenge, the anti-plastic group that lured me to NaBloPoMo, has staked out its own territory. Go forth and discover new ways to eliminate the substance that will not die from your lives.

Pellet Report

It took us less than thirty seconds to find the first pellet. It was there, like the others, on Moolack Beach amid seaweed, dessicated crab legs, errant shorebird feathers and lots and lots of plastic crap.

These are pre-production plastic pieces (five times fast?), and only 2-3 millimeters wide, so they can be difficult to see. As instructed, we picked them up with stainless steel tweezers, and placed them carefully in a pouch we'd formed from aluminum foil. We brought them back home, where they posed for this photograph. They will soon be winging their way to Japan for analysis. Wanna play? Go here.

The nasty yellow ones supposedly contain the highest concentrations of PCB. Yippee. The big blue one looked right on the beach, but I think I'll remove it -- I suspect its just a random chunk of plastic amongst the pellets.

I had salmon for dinner.

Endangered Species Thursday: Albatrosses

First, the video, with one of my favorite people, Sir David Attenborough:



Albatrosses don't just have plastic problems, they have hook problems. Fishing hooks. You see, albatrosses eat sea life, and so the baited hooks used to catch seafood are a big draw for them. They see a tasty morsel on the water, swoop in, bite down, get hooked, and then get dragged through the water, drowning or choking to death. Often, there is a chick like this waiting on land for food whose parent never arrives:

Photo by and courtesy of Ben Osborne

This happens to 100,000 albatrosses per year. These birds breed slowly, so this adds up to a big problem. Nineteen of the twenty-two species of albatross are imperiled by long-line fishing. Three species are critically endangered. Seven are merely endangered.

Fortunately, there are solutions. BirdLife International is working with the fishing folks to take a few simple measures to alleviate the problem, such as installing simple bird-scaring devices on boats, dyeing bait blue to make it more difficult for the birds to see, and using mechanisms to make the bait sink past the birds' reach. To that end, they've created an Albatross Task Force whose job it is to get on the fishing boats and do the hard practical work of implementing these fixes.

Read the journals of Task Force members here, containing posts on their work on the fishing boats in different parts of the world. The thing that strikes you as you read these journals is how careful the Task Force members are to convince the people on the fishing boats that seabird protections are compatible with a good catch. They recognize that winning over the people working the boats is critical. Ultimately, of course, BirdLife International wants to convince governments and the fishing industry to get serious about protecting these birds, and to make the measures mentioned above part of standard fishing practice. I hope they succeed. I don't want a world without these guys:

Photo courtesy Albatross Task Force

Want to help? Go here.

Instead of the cross/the albatross/around my neck was hung*

Other than the many Sancho seekers, the most common query onto this blog is some variant of Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Most of the searchers end up on this post or this one.

So what's the practical effect of our love affair with plastic, and perhaps tangentially, the Texas-sized patch of the indestructible crap that's floating around in the Pacific?

Watch this and you'll know.







*Name that poem you haven't read since high school.

Sailing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch!

Holy polyethylene, Batman! A blog from folks actually navigating the Great Pacific Garbage Patch!

Here is the entry from September 9, 2007:

The Voyage has begun!!
This evening, just before sunset, ORV Alguita departed from Long Beach, CA for a three week research voyage ending in Hilo, Hawaii. This voyage will take us across over 3,000 miles of the Pacific Ocean to the "Eastern Garbage Patch". During the voyage the ships research team will be hard at work collecting samples to study the growing amount of plastic debris in the Pacific Gyre. The crew will keep us updated, answer our questions, and share their experiences with us as they go! This should be an exciting voyage for both us and the crew!

The link is to the September archive of the blog. Scroll down and read from the bottom up as usual.

Also, via the same blog, check out the International Pellet Watch. If you're near a beach, you can go and collect pellets and send them to Dr. Hideshige Takada in Japan, who is doing research on persistent organic pollutants. That sounds like the perfect project for a rainy November on the Oregon coast.

Updated: Go here for an appalling video on the effects of plastic on wildlife.

Earthblogging: Enjoy it while it lasts

So, today is Blog Action Day, where everyone writes about the environment.

Originally, I thought it might be a bad time for me to do this, to the extent that I'm supposed to write something uplifting. After all, I recently had a hissy fit about tigers in India, and I just spent this weekend photographing these:


Clearcuts.

So I was wondering, as I am wont to do when I get all maudlin, what good it would do to write another post about the environment.

And then I remembered that isn't the point. I didn't have the power to kill the earth all by myself, and there's no reason to expect myself to save it singlehandedly. You talk about it and write about it because you can't do otherwise -- not because you actually expect it to help anything. At least not in a world where the company that brought us a wildly popular hybrid is lobbying against tougher CAFE standards, anyway.

So, my suggestions? Enjoy it while it lasts. Here I am, back where I'm closer to the bears and the wolves, having climbed halfway up the mountain yesterday to look upon the valley below, and I suggest you all take some time to revel in something not created by a human hand. Whether it's a tamarack painted gold by the fall, a wilderness landscape, your cat or your kid, enjoy it now, unburdened by worry, guilt or urgency.

And then tomorrow, sign up for green power.*




*Believe it or not, my power company will not let me have green power because I made two late payments a couple of years ago. So I have to wait until they deem me worthy of the privilege of not befouling the earth to run my coffee maker. Bastards.

The World Without Us

I've never had much patience for misanthropy. Once you boil it down, it always seems to be just a self-indulgent hatred of life in general with a healthy dollop of self-righteous superiority. That doesn't mean I'm not susceptible to it, of course. I am, and I think a lot of folks with environmentalist tendencies are too. Humans really are screwing the environmental pooch, if you know what I mean. But I've always thought it was uselessly whiny to spend valuable time pining for human extinction. (Hey dipshit! You won't be here to know how great it is once that happens!)

But once you start reading -- or in my case, listening to -- The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman, it's hard not to be smacked upside the head with how much nicer the earth would be for pretty much everything else if we were all zapped up to the planet Zorcon. (Planet Zorcon, on the other hand, would doubtless undergo a precipitous decline shortly thereafter.) This book takes as its premise the extinction, whether sudden or otherwise, of humanity, and tracks what happens on earth from there. The immediate impression you get from this is that the earth would be like a dog relieved of a horrendous infestation of fleas.

The elephant population would quickly resurge once the poachers were gone. New York City, inside of a few hundred years, would revert to rivers and forests. The atmosphere would begin the long process of adjusting its carbon levels back to normal.

Oh, don't get me wrong. We wouldn't be entirely unmourned. Head lice would be very upset if we were to leave, as they are almost entirely dependent on us. Cockroaches up north would die without heat in the winter.

In my doggedly non-misanthropic worldview, The World Without Us is useful -- beyond idle curiosity -- only as a guide to how to keep humans (and others) from becoming extinct in the first damn place. By raising the alarm to the indelible changes we're causing in such a creative way, the book forces the reader to question her assumptions, not the least of which is the sense of her own harmlessness.

And I'm only halfway through.

Garbage Patch Kids

Photo: Melbourne Zoo

Ever heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? It's an ocean of crap, folks. Literally:

The North Pacific Gyre (also known as the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre) is a swirling vortex of ocean currents comprising most of the northern Pacific Ocean.

****

The centre of the North Pacific Gyre is relatively stationary...and the circular rotation around it draws waste material in. This has led to the accumulation of flotsam and other debris in huge floating 'clouds' of waste which have taken on informal names, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the Eastern Garbage Patch or the Pacific Trash Vortex. While historically this debris has biodegraded, the gyre is now accumulating vast quantities of plastic and marine debris. Rather than biodegrading, plastic photodegrades, disintegrating in the ocean into smaller and smaller pieces. These pieces, still polymers, eventually become individual molecules, which are still not easily digested.[1] The photodegraded plastic can attract pollutants such as PCBs. The floating particles also resemble zooplankton, which can lead to them being consumed by jellyfish, thus entering the ocean food chain.

No, seriously. And you know what else? It's huge. It's as big as Texas. Yeah, that Texas. And the animals are eating it. (Updated: Want to know how much of it they're eating? This video isn't pretty, but everyone should watch it.)

Plastic has bugged me for awhile. It's hard to realize the ubiquity of plastic until you've had your attention drawn to it. And it lasts hundreds of years. Ever bought stamps or movie tickets at Costco? They come encased in ginormous book-sized plastic clams (which I believe are non-recyclable.) I ate a piece of string cheese yesterday individually wrapped in plastic. Hell, my free-range turkey breast slices are wrapped in plastic and then packaged in a plastic tub. (I don't buy those anymore.)

And then there's the deceptively humble plastic bag. The link above notes that between 500 billion and a trillion plastic bags are used every year. I think there are issues surrounding the ethos of individual action -- too often, the effectiveness of individual action is promoted and exaggerated by entrenched interests as a diversion from the institutional change that might impact those interests -- but it seems to me that this is an area that's ripe for it.

There is a certain evangelistic opportunity here as well. If you live in a less environmentally aware area, there is fun to be had by presenting the grocery store cashier with a bunch of reusable canvas bags. I think I'm going to start carrying around cards made from the sea turtle picture above and simply handing them out whenever I'm questioned about reusable bags.

There are several ways to make fun reusable bags. See this post by Redneck Mother for links. (I'm thinking about making a quilted bag out of some of my scraps.) I dropped this link in RM's comment section, which is a set of instructions for making an (aesthetically pleasing) reusable produce bag. My sister and I gave these as Christmas gifts one year. (Plunk in a compact fluorescent light bulb and a copy of An Inconvenient Truth and you have a good gift for environmentally clueless parents and grandparents.) Don't have the time or desire to make your own? Go here.

See also Rose's post on her personal bag journey.

But whatever you do, please don't feed the sea turtles.

No miracles today, sorry

You know how, every time you hear that an animal is endangered, you sort of assume that someone's taking care of it, and it'll end up like the bald eagles I now see fairly frequently along the Kootenai River?

Not so.

India's tigers will require a miracle to avoid extinction, says Valmik Thapar, a renowned Indian tiger expert. The tigers' numbers have more than halved just in the last five years.

[Thapar] said the tiger's survival was dependent on rapid action, reform and strong protection of the animals and their habitat.

But instead, Thapar said, the government was placing the animals under greater risk with a new law giving people rights over forest resources and advocating the co-existence of tigers and man.

Thapar has written fifteen books on tigers and made about twenty documentaries, many of them showing his seven-year interaction with a tigress he named "Macchli", or fish, due to a fish-like mark on her cheek. He was also the first to document how male tigers behave in the tiger family unit. But now he has concluded that his life is a failure because he has failed to save India's tigers.

He says, of his career:

"The most moving and memorable time was with a tigress and her three tiny cubs. I watched her in the early morning sun for two hours, it brought tears to my eyes. I wept in joy -- the joy of the devotion of a mother to her little ones," he said.

"But if you look at it today, those mothers are being killed and the cubs are dying as the mothers don't return home."

Am I the only one who finds comfort in knowing that such wild creatures exist, even though I never see them? Am I the only one who finds their plight more pressing than the latest Britney Spears cr*tch shot? Given the recent Giant Otter swarm to this blog, I don't think I am.

But can you feel the loneliness that must dog Thapar as he absorbs the life of these creatures, only to watch them be carelessly destroyed? Making documentary after documentary, writing book after book, running around with your hair on fire trying to tell people they are losing part of their world, only to watch these tigers be poached for their skin? Hunted into extinction?

If only his words here were still true:



I guess, ultimately, it doesn't matter as long as we have our comfortable lives in the suburbs, our iPhones and good pizza. And I'm serious about that. Isn't that the lesson of the modern age? I may be little better than the next guy on that score. But is that real? Is it the truth? Or is the same indifference that's killing the tigers of a piece with the emerging reality that we may be indulging ourselves to death?

Sorry for the downer, guys. I'll try to post something a little more uplifting later. But this article just sent me right into the mental crapper.

Imagine

(If you're looking for my posts on Sancho and Carolina Vargas, they are all directly below this one, in reverse chronological order, for those of you unfamiliar with this blog. Carolina has answered several questions, and there are more questions in the last post, but we must be patient. Carolina is very busy, and thinking and writing in a different language takes a lot of time!)


Michael, a recent Sancho-inspired reader, e-mailed me a link to this post on his real estate blog. According to the post, there is a parcel of land for sale in the Brazilian Amazon -- a mere 1.2 million acre parcel.

That's a little less than twice the size of Rhode Island and a little larger than my beloved Glacier National Park -- though it's only a tiny part of Brazil, which is an enormous country.

Michael observed that there are only about 24 individuals on earth who could afford, on their own, to purchase this plot of land. Michael further reflected that those 24 individuals could afford to make, with only a few limitations, pretty much any positive environmental impact they want.

Imagine it. In a world in which ordinary people are (justifiably) exhorted to drive less, use less energy, install compact flourescent bulbs, and buy carbon credits, what, if anything, is the moral duty of the super-rich? (This may be, ultimately, an irrelevant and silly question. It seems that very few people in America are interested in imposing moral duties upon the wealthy; and really, who'd listen anyway?)

I wish that 1.2 million acre parcel would be used for the good of the Brazilian environment and the world at large -- sustainably managed, a haven for stressed wildlife, gently productive for the Brazilian people. But I don't think we live in that kind of world -- yet. Perhaps one day, all around the earth, we won't have to fantasize about buying such pieces of land ourselves in order to see them responsibly used.

More giant otter information from Carolina Vargas - Updated 2009

Update, 2009: If you're looking for information about Raising Sancho or Carolina, there's been a lot of digital ink spilled on this blog about that very subject! Click here for a collection of posts, including one I wrote on 2/1/09 about what Carolina's doing now.

Here is some interesting information that Carolina Vargas has kindly shared with me. (See below for the other Sancho-inspired posts.) I hope she will let me know if I get anything wrong here!

Giant otters are quite endangered, and the main obstacle to studying them and conserving their populations is, of course, money. Dr. Vargas says that gathering biological information takes a great deal of time, and therefore, a large amount of money. Fortunately, there are some good researchers working on giant otter studies. The Frankfurt Zoological Society (which I linked in a previous post), is the oldest and best established, and is working in Peru. There is a support page, but it's in Euros, since the Society is located in Germany. There does not appear to be a means to pay by credit card on the site. When I have a moment later on, I will e-mail the Society and ask advice on how Americans might donate. (Does anyone reading this speak German?)

The first long term study on giant otters was conducted in Suriname by Nicole Duplaix. I found links to several of her papers in English here. (There is additional information on that website as well.)

Brazil has 3/4 of the giant otters' distribution, mostly in the Pantanal and the Amazon. Since watching the show and doing these posts, I've been reading a lot about the Pantanal. For Americans, think of it as an inland Everglades, except much, much bigger and even more biodiverse. In fact, the Pantanal is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet.

I'm actually thinking about traveling there during the next dry season (right now is the last part of the dry season. The wet season begins in November). My family may have some time to travel in the coming year, and we have been trying to decide where to go. This morning, Dr. Vargas kindly e-mailed a link to the eco-lodge where her studies and her work with Sancho occurred. You will recognize it if you browse the website. Fishing is not permitted there, so the giant otters are doing very well, and its common to see them during the dry season. (Remember the large family of ten from the show?) I hope to be able to go, but the events of the next several months are a bit uncertain for me. We'll see!

Carolina, if you are still checking in, I just thought of a question: You mentioned that you were involved with wildlife rehabilitation before you worked with Sancho. What animals did you work with while you were doing that? What circumstances led you to begin working with giant otters? (Okay, so that's two questions.)



Update: Oops! I need to read more carefully. I unintentionally failed to include the Wildlife Conservation Society, which has been a source of funding for giant otter studies in the past, as well as Dr. Vargas's work. Donation page here. (There is also a link for "specific donation opportunities" on that page.)

And updated again: Carolina adds three Brazilian organizations doing important otter research. (These pages are in Portuguese, but you can use google translator to translate the page into English.) The first two are governmental organizations, and the last one is nongovernmental:

Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia (Amazon Research Institute), EMBRAPA Pantanal, and the Ecolontras Project. (I have been having trouble with that last link. I don't know whether their server is down or if perhaps my computer is the problem.)

River otters, this time

To those of you looking for my posts about Raising Sancho, you can find them -- and several very interesting comments by Carolina Vargas -- directly beneath this post.

Well, I was about to walk out the door with my camera bag this morning and the light took a turn for the worse. A few minutes later I got a phone call telling me I have more legal work to do. (For those who don't know, I'm licensed as an attorney and I use that work to finance my travel, nature photography, and nature seminars, like the one I took this summer on climate change and glacial recession in Glacier National Park, Montana.)

So I'm going to post this hilarious video I found on youtube, involving river otters. I may just declare this Mustelid Week on this blog. If Discovery Channel can have Shark Week, we can have Mustelid Week. When I fall in love with an animal, I fall hard.

All otters, all the time -- Updated, 2009

Update, 2009: If you're looking for information about Raising Sancho or Carolina, there's been a lot of digital ink spilled on this blog about that very subject! Click here for a collection of posts, including one I wrote on 2/1/09 about what Carolina's doing now.

Update: Hello, Sancho fans from the October airing! I viewed Raising Sancho for the first time in September, and I wrote a series of posts that was generated in part by the scads of folks who found their way here looking for updates on Sancho. Carolina Vargas found us as well, and left a number of comments on the posts! For some reason, Google directs most readers to this post, but to read the whole group of posts, go here and begin at the bottom, moving up as you go. Please feel free to leave comments of your own on any of the posts. I don't know if Carolina will be checking back in or not. This post does contain names of organizations that do giant otter research for those of you who are interested.

As all of you know, I was deeply moved by Raising Sancho, and I've become really interested in giant otters (and mustelids in general as I learn more about them) since this show aired. And if you're reading this, it's a safe bet that you feel the same way.

Meanwhile, I've been doing more reading and looking around. Giant otters are endangered, and if present trends continue, their already-low numbers may halve in the next twenty years. For many years, they were extensively hunted for their pelts. Now, they face threats from mercury poisoning, habitat loss, illegal hunting, persecution from fishermen who perceive them as competition, and diseases passed on by domestic animals, such as parvovirus and distemper.

Go here and here for organizations working on giant otter conservation. Note that the latter organization has a page entitled Ways to Help. The Frankfurt Zoological Society also does giant otter conservation work in South America. Note also the page entitled "Support."

Here is a brief and charming video of a small group of giant otters.

I'll probably update this post with further links as I find them, for those who are as otter-obsessed as I am right now.

Further links: I'll be heading out to do some photography here shortly, but I wanted to provide you with a few interesting items. Regular reader Kristy viewed Raising Sancho yesterday and writes about it on her blog. Kristy points out that, too often, we expect neat endings with no ambiguity, and that isn't always how life goes.

Also, check this out. I could watch these guys forever. I believe what the first otter is doing is called periscoping. (Perhaps if Carolina is still checking in, she could tell me if that's correct or not.) I'll be back later on this afternoon. Feel free to continue the discussion in any of the three posts -- this has been great.

Anotter post

Photo by and courtesy of Renaud d'Avout d'Auerstaedt under a Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike license

I'm sorry for that title. Really, I am. Clearly I need coffee.

For those of you just arriving, you can find my first post on Raising Sancho here. Last night I wrote an e-mail to Dr. Vargas and sent it to the address found by alert commenter Bethany. It reads as follows:

Dear Dr. Vargas:

I'm sure you've been getting many e-mails since "Raising Sancho" has been airing, and I apologize for adding to the lot. I tried to find the answers to my questions on google, but was unsuccessful. And if it were only my questions, I might have been more reluctant to e-mail you.

But I was incredibly touched by Raising Sancho, and I wrote a post about it on my (previously obscure) personal blog. For some reason, my website ended up on the first page of google rankings in English for most related queries, and I've been absolutely deluged with site visitors since then -- all people searching for information on you and Sancho. Several people have left comments on the post expressing their sadness at the uncertainty of the ending. (Post and comments here.) One concerned reader found your e-mail address and asked me to write.

So, I wonder if you could either answer the following questions or point me to a website or article that contains the answers, if there are any.

1. The show stated that, three months after Sancho's departure, you still had not encountered him again. Have you ever seen him since that time? I did review the English portion of one of your scholarly papers here that observes that "sub-adults may wander off as a subgroup for weeks on end, eventually rejoining their parents." Given this behavioral characteristic, I began to wonder if perhaps he had returned after the three months mentioned in the episode.

2. Are you still studying giant otters in the Pantanal? Have you written anything else about your work in English that's posted on the web? Also, I'd be interested in knowing what organizations do significant work with giant otters. I know they face threats from mercury pollution, mining, and possibly illegal mahogany logging. But I have only found one such organization on the internet -- at least, on the English version of Google, which may be the problem, since it appears that most of the work is done in Brazil.

Again, I apologize for adding to what must be a mountain of e-mails. But so many people fell in love with Sancho and found their way to my site, wanting to know more. For myself, I'd just like to say that I think your work, dedication and your devotion to Sancho are absolutely inspiring. I'm fascinated by giant otters, and I'm eager to learn more about them -- and conservations efforts on their behalf -- in the future.

Thank you for your time,

[My name redacted]

I have not yet received a response, but I only sent it twelve hours ago. I'll post any response from Dr. Vargas, if I get one, assuming I have her permission to do so.

Meanwhile, I've been doing a bit more reading. I found this interesting article on the Defenders of Wildlife website. Please take careful note of the "What you can do" section on the right sidebar of that article. Think of Sancho next time you consider buying gold or mahogany. These guys are seriously endangered, and after seeing the show, I can't imagine a world without them.

I also found this website on giant otters. See also the International Otter Survival Fund.

Please post links to any interesting reading that you may have found.