| <div class="ck-content"><h3>Snowdrifts for seals</h3><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255);color:rgb(31,31,31);">‘Like a giant bird box’: the volunteers building huge snowdrifts for Finland’s pregnant seals: a </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/16/saimaa-ring-seals-endangered-extinct-finland-volunteers-snow-drifts-aoe "><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255);color:rgb(31,31,31);">Guardian article</span></a><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255);color:rgb(31,31,31);"> that delighted me. Any human who devotes themself to saving non-humans is a hero of the first degree, in my book.</span></p><blockquote><p>Eight hours shovelling snow in -20C might not sound like the ideal day out, but a committed team of volunteers in Finland are working dawn to dusk building enormous snow drifts for one of the world’s most endangered seals.</p><p>The Saimaa ringed seal was once common around Lake Saimaa in the south-east of the country, but only 495 of them remain.</p><p>The seals make “snow caves” inside snow drifts where they raise their young and protect them from the elements and predators such as red foxes – but as the climate warms, the snow is disappearing.</p><p>To save these rare seals, 300 volunteers spend days shovelling snow into piles 7m long and 1.5m high around the edge of the frozen lake. Last winter they made 200, and the seal population is growing as a result.</p></blockquote><div class="raw-html-embed"><img src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/27647a237e72c409a5f512e00fd960417cb1fc94/0_546_8192_4918/master/8192.jpg?width=300&dpr=2&s=none&crop=none" alt="REPLACE"></div><h3><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255);color:rgb(31,31,31);">Humor a uniquely human trait? Argh!</span></h3><div class="raw-html-embed"><img src="https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=1L7WBiXsmef6_9BIYgCKZFLSn4-MHctrK&sz=w600-h400" alt="REPLACE"></div><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255);color:rgb(31,31,31);">Yes, it's me again, expressing exasperation about humans feeling like they need to investigate what seems obvious to anyone who spends times around non-humans: that we are just like them, I was, however, a bit surprised by t</span><a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/great-apes-joke-around-suggesting-humor-is-older-than-humans/"><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255);color:rgb(31,31,31);">his article in Scientific American</span></a><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255);color:rgb(31,31,31);">, which states:</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255);color:rgb(31,31,31);">Over the past several years my colleagues and I have been studying teasing in humans and great apes to figure out why—and when—this behavior evolved....Although scholars have traditionally viewed humor as a uniquely human trait, our findings suggest that it has surprisingly deep roots.</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255);color:rgb(31,31,31);">Really? Have scholars really viewed humor as uniquely human? I thought it was fairly common knowledge that dolphins have a wicked sense of humor, that octopuses play tricks on humans, </span><a href="https://thestute.com/2014/04/25/crows-arent-just-smart-they-also-have-a-sense-of-humor/"><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255);color:rgb(31,31,31);">ravens and crows</span></a><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255);color:rgb(31,31,31);"> play all sorts of games. Of course I haven't experienced much of that myself. However, there are dogs in my family. One - Falcor - is obsessed with squirrels. And so I know, firsthand, that squirrels <i>love</i> to tease Falcor by flicking their tails, just out of rich of the leaping dog.</span></p><p>In case you might have your own firsthand evidence on non-human senses of humor, you can submit your observation here:</p><p><a href="https://www.observinganimals.org/teasing"><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255);color:rgb(31,31,31);">https://www.observinganimals.org/teasing</span></a></p><h3><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255);color:rgb(31,31,31);">Busy Holiday Season</span></h3><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255);color:rgb(31,31,31);">Things have not quieted down as the end of year holidays come upon us. On Friday, I joined a group rallied by the Wendy Olson Arboretum to kill a bunch of English ivy, glossy privet and ailanthus in a neighbor's property across the street, reminding us that invasives don't respect property boundaires. On Saturday, volunteers cleared the Brumley South understory of olive. On Sunday, a big group of 20 enthusiastic Durhamites cut down a whole bunch of really big glossy privet, thorny olive and horned holly in Rocky Creek Park. On Monday morning, another pumped up crew braved the cold (so cold we couldn't do the “paint” in cut-and-paint - no herbicides) to clear two big stands of glossy privet at that same park. And Monday afternoon, three students of East Chapel Hill HS walked the Dry Creek Trail near their school, killing autumn olive and thorny olive. Here they are holding up a 15 ft glossy privet they just killed.</span></p><div class="raw-html-embed"><img src="https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=1-ClpeijOS3UXJrqCC3RjQzeG4mxr2zJX&sz=w400-h600" alt="REPLACE"></div><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255);color:rgb(31,31,31);">It was fun. It's always fun doing this work with kids (and at the ripe old age of 66, anyone under 30 seems like a kid to me </span><span class="text-tiny" style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255);color:rgb(31,31,31);">😆</span><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255);color:rgb(31,31,31);">). After we were done, I returned to the site of previously-noticed fat, dark kudzu vines…and did them in. That's a 13" saw in the middle of those vines, by the way.</span></p><div class="raw-html-embed"><img src="https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=177HF6StboOJGJ4euN4c8dfmFD_dM-PkA&sz=w600-h400" alt="REPLACE"></div><p>That's just a single long weekend, and just the ones I was involved with. There's so much more going on; 2024 has been a very good year for invasives removal and native ecosystem restoration in the Triangle. I'll have more to say about this soon, but just to give you a sense of the level of activity, in Brumley South alone<strong>,</strong> we held <strong>over 100 events in 2024</strong> - up from 70 in 2023 (which was already quite a lot, doncha think?).</p><p>Many of you reading this newsletter have had a hand in this sacred, life-giving work. Thank you for joining me on the journey.</p></div><div class="ck-content"><h3>Receive all my reports on tree rescues</h3><p>If you'd like to get some good news about restoring native habitats delivered straight to your brain upwards of a few times a week, sign in to <a href="https://rewildearth.net">Rewild Earth</a>, click on your name in top right, then My profile. Under Communication Preferences, switch “Send reports of all events” to ON. </p><div class="raw-html-embed"><img src="https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=1BeynVqu8taOGrsvi56u0mmDKuNJko22h&sz=w600-h400" alt="REPLACE" width="358" height="138"></div><h3>Resources you might find useful</h3><ul><li><a href="https://shop.naisma.org/collections/buckthorn-blaster">Buckthorn Blasters</a>: safe, easy herbicide delivery system from the North American Invasive Species Management Association. Don't start cutting without them!</li><li><a href="https://nc-ipc.weebly.com/nc-invasive-plants.html">NC Invasive Plants list</a>: recently updated by NC-IPC, the NC Invasives Plants Council.</li><li><a href="https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/AG259">Overview of different herbicides</a>: glyposphate, triclopyr and others - which should you use?</li><li>Volunteer for <a href="https://triangleland.org">Triangle Land Conservancy</a>: the biggest land conservancy group in our area. </li><li>Volunteer for <a href="https://ellerbecreek.org">Ellerbe Creek Watershed Association</a> (Durham): a wonderful group working hard to maintain contiguous natural areas along Ellerbe Creek.</li></ul></div> |