Pulled from the comments, another amazing otter story

Commenter and Sancho fan Dave was kind enough to tell us the incredible story of the river otter he raised as a kid in Florida. Dave writes:

I was about 13 or 14 when my otter turned up behind my house. We lived on a small river down in Florida. The otter my mom named Samba was alittle older than Sancho. His mother had been killed by something, it looked like maybe a boat or a gator. He took to my dog (Golden Retriever) like it was his mother. The two where always together they would meet me at the bus stop in the afternoons and we would play and fish most days. I didn't have the knowledge of Carolina to help him get back to being on his own. So he would mostly just sit lay next to me while I fished for his food.

To me otters have the best outlook on things they are always playing and socializing with there family and friends. He could sence if I was stressed when I would get off the bus from school (everybody knows middle school can be a stressful place) and he would always do something funny or make weird noises and before I knew it whatever had happed that day was long forgottin. Alittle like Sancho's story mine does not have the best ending. One day Samba was in the garage under my fathers car and he was running late to work or something and he was trying to get Samba to come out (my father and Samba did spend alot of time together so Samba did not know him that well) so he reached under his car to pull Samba out and grabbed him by the tail and Samba bit him. It was not a bad bit I asked my dad and he said it didn't even draw blood but like any caring parent he was concerned and he called the local wildlife department.

Thats the sad part like Sancho's story. Here is the nice ending many years later with what would later become my wife, we where at Seaworld and I was telling my to be wife that a had raised in otter for about a year just like the one in show we where watching. I also told her that the local wildlife department didn't have the right habitat ect to keep my otter so they gave him to Seaworld. So she pressured me to go ask after the show if he was still around. So I did knowing that the likelyhood was very slim. But I did knowing my soon to be wife would not let me off the hook if I didn't.

I walked up to the trainer after the show and asked if they had an otter named Samba he said no, "I know it" is what I was thinking. The trainer asked why I told him my story and where I was from and how long ago it was. He told me that was really weird because they have an otter that came from the same area I lived same age as Samba would have been ect... But his name was Otis. He asked me if I would like to see him, Of corse I said yes so me and my wife went behind stage to the otter habitat.

I had no idea they had as many otters as they did there must have been 10-12 otters of all different types and before we even got up to the habitat the guy was going to show us I pointed out Samba and he saw me. He was standing up tall at the back of his little river area and he ran up to the front wall so I could see him. The trainer laughed and said so you do know Otis. I talked with the trainer for quite some time then and he told me that I answered alot of the question he and the other trainers had as to why Samba was the way he was. They told me he was by far the oldest otter they had but still the fastest out of the water he said that he runs more like a dog than the others and that it now make sences being that my dog and him where like a Mother - son relationship.

So I am holding out hope that one day Sancho and Carolina will be reunited like me and Samba where.

Thanks to Dave for sharing this great story! I love it.

More ugly!

Via Ugly Overload (which I arrived at via commenter Toots), I see that PBS Nature is holding an ugly animal photo contest on Flickr. Go on over and check out the entrants. There are some doozies. But I'm with Toots -- the Cape Griffon Vulture is actually pretty cute.

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?

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.

Play

Reader RS sends me this amazing photographic sequence. Interspecies interactions like these -- the ones that don't involve predatory behavior -- demonstrate that life is more than the sum of its parts. There is more than eating, hunting, sleeping, and reproducing in the animal world. There is play, and in some cases, relationship. This is where spirit lies in the nonhuman world. Maybe that's the intangible something that touched so many of us with Sancho and Carolina, and what makes this sequence of images so breathtaking.

Who's been purgin' the sturgeon?*

I really don't know what to make of this. East of Portland about 45 minutes lies the Bonneville dam, which hosts on its grounds a trout hatchery and a pond which held seven endangered white sturgeon. Till Monday morning anyway, when an employee found the pond empty.

Sturgeon aren't little. I've been to Bonneville a few times, and those fish were big -- the news article says about five feet long, and that's about right. Here's a great image of them.

I guess I'd like to know how you can remove seven ginormous fish from a pond on a federal site without being noticed. This is a dam, people -- security once searched my trunk when I was taking my son to feed the trout at the hatchery. (Though I'm pretty sure that was because of the profusion of anti-W bumper stickers on my car.)

People suck.


*The single positive aspect of this event is that it allowed me to use this phrase in a socially acceptable manner.

Otter cam

After the mid-September Otter Fest that went down here, I felt the need to visit some of our mustelid friends. About the same time, I noticed that last week was Sea Otter Awareness Week at the Oregon Aquarium. There are no giant otters at the Oregon Aquarium. As far as I know, the only zoo in the U.S. that has giant otters is in Philadelphia.

But I wanted to see some otters, so we packed up and headed to the Oregon coast, where we proceeded to have any number of camera-related battery malfunctions. (Later it was determined that these problems were mostly due to attempting to charge the batteries in the car.) Before the video and still cameras gave us the Big Battery Finger, Mr. T got a couple of otter videos and I got a decent image of a shrimp. That's it. It was still fun, of course. The Kid got to hang out at the touch pool and walk through the aquarium hallway, so he was pleased.

None of the voices on here belong to us, but I think a few of the kids bumped into him and caused some camera shake in the middle.

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.

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.

Glacial Recession V

I'm starting to channel the Friday the 13th franchise with my serial glaciering, but this one's the last.

The final day we hiked a bit along the Highline Trail, looking at excellent examples of the U-shaped valleys carved by glaciation and generally just winding down from the day before. Jeff will likely offer the seminar again next summer, and I'll probably go again, as he plans to hike to other glaciers in the park next time.

The entire seminar was just great. I learned a great deal, not just about glaciation and the effects of climate change on the park, but about geology in general. Mr. T was a geologist before he became a bidnessman, but I had always glazed over during discussions of faults and synclines and formations, until I was standing in front of the real thing with someone explaining it to me. I can be a stickler for technicalities, particularly when dealing with terminology (imagine that!), and that was tripping me up a bit. Or rather, I tended to approach geological terminology with an overly literal mindset.

But really, I have to plug the Glacier Institute now. I mentioned to Jeff during class that I thought there was a good chance I'd become an Institute junkie. Just look at all the classes and seminars they offer. I could spend ten months just taking class after class, and I'd never get bored. The neat thing is that many classes allow kids as young as six to attend. So I think The Kid and I might take some seminars together in the coming years.

Finally, there are a slew of crevasse photos in my photostream here. (There are a few mountain goat shots in there, but the bulk of it is the Grinnell Glacier.) Perhaps you'll be able to get a sense from those images how unnerving it is to be hiking around them.

And sometimes, unnerving is good.

Glacial Recession, Part IV

A few months ago I wrote this post but never published it, as it just seemed entirely too navel-gazish:

I think it may be time for new boots. I've had these for almost nine years. I bought them at a small outdoor store in Greensboro, North Carolina just before my first backpacking trip, on the Long Trail in Vermont. I was in my last year of school, and I didn't have the money for them until two days before I left. There was no time for a breaking-in period, but the boots never left a single mark or blister.

These boots have squelched through the mid-summer mud in the Adirondacks. They've taken me on the Appalachian Trail in Virginia and Georgia, along Lake Superior and the rest of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, atop ridges in the Olympic range and to the edge of cold lakes at the base of Mt. Rainier. Last summer they helped me peel off a section of the Pacific Crest Trail in Oregon.

These boots groaned under my pregnant weight while I was photographing prairie dogs and antelopes in the Badlands in South Dakota. They've hugged my feet while I hiked hesitantly around blind corners in Glacier National Park yelling "hey bear!"

They've been a part of most of the deeply gratifying moments I've had in the last ten years that didn't involve parenting -- and some that did. Not to be too maudlin, but giving them up feels too much like the end of an era I'm not ready to close out yet.

Maybe they'll make it another year.

Turns out they didn't.

We hiked about twenty miles over the three days of the seminar, or perhaps a hair less. The second day's hike to Grinnell Glacier constituted the bulk of the hiking, at 12 miles. It was hot, and I worked hard. The first day we hiked to the Hidden Lake Overlook off Logan Pass. On the way back, I felt a sort of odd flapping near my toes. The sole had separated from the boot. It was annoying, but I bought some rubber cement that night and applied it liberally to the detached sole. Then, for good measure, I wrapped the hell out of the boots with copious quantities of duct tape that Jeff had obtained from one of his innumerable park friends.

So we got up to the glacier on the second day, and I saw this standing between me and my glacial experience:


(This person, as you have no doubt astutely surmised, is not me.)

Welp, there was no way I was going through that with my compromised boots. Yeah, 33 degree water and sharp rocks -- just the thing to undo the duct tape and glue. Fortunately, though, I'd brought these along:



But let me tell you something. Until you've had to painstakingly navigate a slippery rock bridge in water just above the freezing point, on feet that are all but completely bare -- well, then you can't possibly understand why I was such a big whiny baby about it. The moment I stepped in, I could literally feel the warmth draining from my feet. (Yes, there was actually a draining feeling.) There were three of these bridges to cross, and I did each one coming and going. By the time I was finished each time, it felt like a thousand needles were pricking my feet.

It hurt. Waaaaah.

Once the pins and needles subsided, it took me about ten minutes to get the feeling back in my feet. Anyone who was completely immersed in that water would die quickly.

Anyhoo, it did the trick. I kept my boots dry, and they didn't blow out completely till there were only three miles left on the hike down. The sharp rocks of the glaciated landscape made perfect striations on the duct tape, and the soles completely detached. But I donned my sandals again, which have a lovely rugged tread on the soles, and continued on.

It was an odd day of temperature extremes, but delightful all the same.


Part V to come -- Wherein I finally shut my trap about this trip, put in a plug for the Glacier Institute, and post miscellaneous pictures.

Glacial Recession -- Part III

The thermometer back at the campground says 95 degrees, but the temperature near the edge of the glacier is at least twenty degrees cooler. In front of me is a massive, grinding river of ice streaked with deep crevasses and powerful enough to chew up mountains.

I’m a little apprehensive about stepping onto this beast, but our workshop instructor, Jeff, is exuberant. He’s already testing the strength of the glacier with his ice axe, listening for hollow, weak ice that won’t support our weight. “Stay to the left of that crevasse,” he advises as he builds a cairn, or pile of rocks, to mark our way. “Oh, and avoid that gray ice over there,” he adds as he moves ahead. Uh, okay. I follow his steps exactly.

Jeff leads us a short way onto the glacier. It’s not safe to go any farther, he says, as the tips of the crevasses extend only a few feet beyond where we’re standing. I look down. The ice beneath my feet seems almost iridescent. Rocks of varying sizes are liberally strewn on and embedded in the ice, accounting for its slightly dirty appearance from afar.

I stay rooted to my spot. Even with the cairns, I’d have an incredibly difficult time finding my way back across the ice safely. Two or three years ago, a day hiker ventured alone onto the glacier while his friends waited, and fell 35 feet into a crevasse. After much grueling work, the Park Service managed to extricate him from the crevasse, but he died shortly afterward.

Jeff talks about glacial formations and characteristics. He points out a moulin, which is a vertical shaft that runs down into the glacier. He reminds us of the discussion in An Inconvenient Truth about lakes forming beneath glaciers, and tells us that moulins like this facilitate the flow of water beneath the ice sheet.

This place is not quiet; different noises punctuate Jeff’s speech. You can hear the loud rush of water somewhere below, and once or twice a thunderous sound interrupted our discussion. Cracking ice.

Even though this glacier is a fraction of the size it was 150 years ago, it still seems just massive. I try to imagine this entire cirque covered in glacial ice, but it seems incomprehensible. But later on, when Jeff shows us how much of the glacier has disappeared just since last summer, the ice appears a good deal smaller.

My son may be lucky enough to see the park’s glaciers before they disappear entirely, but it’s unlikely his children will. The drop dead date for these glaciers is 2030; after that, like the snows of Kilimanjaro, they will be gone.


Part IV, coming soon: Wherein a tragic hiking boot blowout requires me to place my feet, for extended periods of time, into water that only a short time before had been ice.

Glacial Recession -- Part II

Now that I’ve offered an ominous opener, let me throw out this confusing fact: The glaciers in northwest Montana began to recede in the 1850’s. I know that all of you – astute observers of human history that you are -- will recognize that decade as preceding significant human-generated carbon emissions.

So what gives? This was the question the instructor, Jeff, posed during his introductory slide show. Is the recession of the park’s glaciers caused by humans or is it merely the result of a naturally occurring warming period?

It’s both, of course; the question poses a false dichotomy. Geologic history is peppered with alternating periods of glacial advance and retreat, and the earth had already entered a period of glacial retreat when we started energetically pumping carbon into the atmosphere. So while human activities may not have caused the glaciers to begin melting initially, it’s a safe bet that those activities have dramatically increased the rate, in recent times, at which the glaciers are melting.

Take a look at the picture below.



Where Jeff is standing marks the point to which the glacier extended just last year, and it will recede even further yet this year. And this is on the side of the glacier and not the “toe” – in laymen’s terms, the tip – of the glacier, where melting occurs most rapidly.

It’s also worth noting that this is the kind of thing you hear the wishful thinkers say all the time: “But the glaciers started melting long before the petroleum era, so it can’t be global warming! We’re just in a naturally occurring warming period!” The foundational facts are correct, to be sure -- the glaciers did begin to recede awhile ago, and we are in a natural warming period (or, as I understand it, the end of a much cooler period, which may not be exactly the same thing.) It’s the conclusion they reach that’s faulty. The era of human-generated carbon is coinciding with that period and elevating the planet’s temperature to the point of grim consequences.



Part III: Wherein I attempt to avoid becoming a permanent part of the glacier, as glacial recession, though occurring rapidly, will not happen quickly enough to free me from a crevasse should I be so unlucky as to fall into one.

Glacial Recession, Part I

This is Upper Grinnell Lake in Glacier National Park.

As late as 1969, there was no Upper Grinnell Lake. That's because what is now the lake used to be part of the Grinnell Glacier.

The lake gets bigger every year.

Fire

One of the things that distresses me in Montana is the sense you get, starting about July, that the whole damn place is about to go up in flames. Drought conditions have afflicted the American West for more than a decade, and it's spreading. Now up to a third of the entire U.S. is suffering from drought.

I've been spending time in Montana for seven or eight years now, and I have no recollection of summer conditions that weren't incredibly dry. It's remarkable if you're not used to it. It's as if you can feel the dryness sapping the moisture from your body. There's almost a friction to the air.

In these conditions, the slightest spark can destroy thousands of acres.

I'm eyeing the weather report tonight, because scattered thunderstorms are forecast for Thursday. It seems this is how so many fires are sparked in that area -- by thunderstorms that don't offer enough wetness to discourage fire, but just enough lightning to start one.

Fires are already burning all over the West, including Oregon, Washington and Montana.

I spent some time in Glacier in 2003 when the park was besieged by fire, and it made an stark impression on me. Last week I walked through some of the forest that had burned during that summer, and observed the succession -- beautiful wildflowers against black, charred tree trunks.

Time. As I strolled through the burn I marveled: it's only time that's the difference between a leisurely walk and standing in the middle of an inferno.

Hello, I'm an adorable baby mountain goat from Glacier National Park

Your daily dose of way-too-friggin-cute.

(Courtesy of Tony.)

Hoofing it

There is nothing quite like spotting a freshly severed deer leg on the trail to quicken the pulse and heighten the senses. This effect is magnified when that trail branches off your driveway.

The leg was mostly stripped clean of meat, but undeniably fresh. There are a number of possibilities as to the transporter of said deer leg, ranging from the mundane to the dire. A coyote could have dropped the leg after stripping it from a scavenged carcass. Or it could have been the mama bear who's been loping around this mountain for the last couple of years. Or it could have been -- and I watched the treetops as we headed back home -- the elusive mountain lion.

It's probably the coyotes, though. Wolves have reestablished themselves a few mountains over, and it's put pressure on the coyote population. There's a sister pack that's been hanging around for awhile, and they have regular conversations with the Newfoundland down the road.

That said, none of us will be venturing down that path alone for the remainder of the trip.