Nature news: weird and getting weirder
The holidays usually offer some time to visit with family, to
reflect, and to catch up on the newspapers and magazines that have
been piling up.
The news on the nature front has been so weird in the past week
or so that it makes one wonder why anyone bothers to read
fiction.
Christmas Day, closing time at the San Francisco Zoo, and a
Siberian tiger goes on a field trip that leaves one dead and two
injured.
Nature news: weird and getting weirder
The holidays usually offer some time to visit with family, to reflect, and to catch up on the newspapers and magazines that have been piling up.
The news on the nature front has been so weird in the past week or so that it makes one wonder why anyone bothers to read fiction.
Christmas Day, closing time at the San Francisco Zoo, and a Siberian tiger goes on a field trip that leaves one dead and two injured.
The aftermath has been predictable. There are calls for improving zoo enclosures without much attention paid to the fact that tigers have been held in the same enclosures since the 1930s, and this is the first one to get out.
There’s speculation that the three young men involved in the incident may have done something to provoke the attack.
And, of course, Bay Area papers have been full of letters demanding that the zoo be closed, or that cats are just doing what they do and they don’t belong in zoos, that all zoos be closed, that the young men probably deserved what they got and blah, blah, blah.
I come down firmly on the pro-zoo side. It’s ironic, but the Siberian tiger is one of a host of animals that would probably be rendered extinct but for the intervention, research and stewardship of zoological collections.
Speaking of cats, heck’s-a-poppin in Texas.
Bird lover Jim Stevenson spotted a cat stalking piping plovers under a bridge in Galveston.
Knowing that the ground-nesting birds are particularly vulnerable to that kind of predation, and knowing further that they are endangered, Stevenson apparently took direct action.
He shot the cat.
Cat lovers went bananas. Stevenson was arrested, but released after a jury split over whether to convict him. The openly unrepentant bird lover has become a media darling because of his penchant for saying outrageous things.
But he’s been laying low lately. He claims someone fired a shot at him while he was at home. Galveston police expressed skepticism and quickly closed the case. Stevenson went into hiding with a better understanding of the zeal of cat lovers.
Closer to home, Los Angeles Times columnist Joel Stein reports that Orange County is preparing to recycle all of its sewage into tap water.
Stein sums it all up for me: he’s squeamish about drinking strangers’ urine.
But then he goes on to report that the water coming out of the treatment system there isn’t bad at all. And, as the guys who work at the plant turning toilet juice into Perrier point out, all the folks pulling water from the Colorado River are using a source that is the repository for hundreds of upstream treatment plants.
That’s comforting.
Most of the water we get in San Benito County is pumped from underground sources, supplemented by water imported from northernmost California and treated locally. Hollister residents will be sending their used water to a shiny new treatment plant, probably before the end of next year.
There are no plans to put the water back into the tap, but rather to use it for landscaping and the like.
That alone is enough to make me proud to be from San Benito County.
