Chronicling Sixth Great Extinction

Just saw in the magazine of Ducks Unlimited (a fine old conservation organization I support) that the population of light-colored geese (greater and lesser snow geese, Ross' geese) has increased enormously in recent decades--to the point where they are destroying habitat, including critical habitat for ducks and also damaging agriculture. Increased bags permitted to hunters don't seem to be checking their numbers. At least they sure don't seem to be in any danger of extinction.

A few years ago a Ross' goose wintered at the lagoon by my house. It attracted a number of birders since it was south of its customary wintering grounds in the Central Valley. It was a cute little goose. It vanished after some storms in early March. I envisioned the little goose gamely making its way up to its nesting grounds north of the Arctic Circle and wished it well.
 
An article in the L.A. Times the other day stated that in the 1960s there were about 30,000 California sea lions along the coast of our state. Today, mostly because of legal protection, their numbers have burgeoned to about a quarter-million. Again, I ask, "What Great Extinction?"

Oh my! I see I made a very similar post two years ago. My bad!
 
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Jan Libourel said:
An article in the L.A. Times the other day stated that in the 1960s there were about 30,000 California sea lions along the coast of our state. Today, mostly because of legal protection, their numbers have burgeoned to about a quarter-million. Again, I ask, "What Great Extinction?"

Oh my! I see I made a very similar post two years ago. My bad!
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Those dastardly sea lions have really been on your mind
 
Rambo said:
Those dastardly sea lions have really been on your mind
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Well, I do see them on rare occasions when I am out with my dogs. They are going to connect the lagoon near my house with an open channel instead of an underground conduit. The sea lions may come into the lagoon via the channel and turn up on my doorstep! Public opinion on sea lions varies. Some people welcome them, to others they are pests that appropriate and defile choice beaches and consume sought-after game fish and other sea life.
 
^I seem to recall that LelandJ said only a "real idiot" would think cats were a major factor in declining bird populations. No further comment seems necessary.
 
I just read in Living Bird, the periodical of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, about how the 30 million whitetail deer in the eastern USA are just destroying the hardwood forests. They even suggested market hunting as a means of controlling this now out-of-control population. Who would have thought 120 years ago that a conservation-oriented publication would be advocating market hunting, of all things? As I've said many times in this thread, it's not all gloom and doom.

At one time California had an abundance of mule deer, but the do-gooders made this state the mountain lion capital of the world, and their beloved lions have certainly put paid to any possible problems of deer overpopulation. I suspect our ever-burgeoning population of wild hogs may also have played a role. They like to kill and eat fawns.
 
^The wild hogs are non-native. Some may be descended from Eurasian wild boar introduced on hunting preserves, but most are descended from escaped domestic pigs. Tough, hardy, highly intelligent and very fecund, they are overrunning much of the United States and can cause terrible environmental damage. They are very adaptable and can thrive in almost any environment except true arid deserts and high, steep mountains. In California they are now found in every county except for Imperial County, which is almost entirely desert except for some irrigated areas. I doubt whether there are any in San Francisco Country, which is pretty much limited to "The City" and its immediate environs.

In the Southwest, we also have the javelina or collared peccary. This is a true native mammal. Although many people think of them as pigs and they are pig-like in appearance, they are not too closely related to true pigs.
 
Jan Libourel said:
^The wild hogs are non-native. Some may be descended from Eurasian wild boar introduced on hunting preserves, but most are descended from escaped domestic pigs. Tough, hardy, highly intelligent and very fecund, they are overrunning much of the United States and can cause terrible environmental damage. They are very adaptable and can thrive in almost any environment except true arid deserts and high, steep mountains. In California they are now found in every county except for Imperial County, which is almost entirely desert except for some irrigated areas. I doubt whether there are any in San Francisco Country, which is pretty much limited to "The City" and its immediate environs.

In the Southwest, we also have the javelina or collared peccary. This is a true native mammal. Although many people think of them as pigs and they are pig-like in appearance, they are not too closely related to true pigs.
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Evasive species are a problem everywhere, you have the boa constrictors and several other critters in the Everglades as well. Here in the Netherlands you have the tiger mosquito which can carry dengue fever, which there are also now a couple of cases this year in the south of France.

It's a shame our current crop of Greta inspired politicians and policy makers seem to think that the best way to coexist with the natural environment is to let it rip with no intervention from humans at all. On the contrary, we need to manage the wilderness to allow it thrive.
 
In the course of this thread coyotes have come up on occasion. In the last presidential debate Trump mentioned "coyotes" (in the sense of human traffickers along the southern border) as bringing in children. Some fools, ignorant of the term, thought he was claiming that the wild canids were carrying children across the border. Others said that it was a racial slur since coyotes were a "Mexican" animal. Well, the "Mexican animal" is now ubiquitous in the 48 contiguous states. It is also ranges extensively into Alaska and over most of Canada. In the south, the coyote has crossed the Panama Canal. If it can make it through the most inhospitable jungle of the Isthmus of Darien, it will be poised to invade South America. One wonders what carnage these highly efficient predators--ultimate survivors--will wreak on the wildlife of South America and how they may out-compete the many interesting species of native wild canids found in South America.
 
I have been preaching for years that these damn wind turbines cause terrible slaughter among birds and bats. Just recently, I saw in the papers that in recent years about 100 rare and endangered California condors have been killed by these horrible devices. However, few voices are raised in protest because everybody loves "green energy" so much! Solar reflectors also cause a great mortality among birds.
 
More good news! The bald, AKA "American," eagle, which was on the ropes and facing extinction, largely because of DDT, back when I was a young man in the 1960s, has made a remarkable comeback. One estimate placed their population at 316,700--positively heartwarming, it is!
 
Rambo said:
Jan Libourel Jan Libourel did you read about this?

www.cbsnews.com

How a shocking environmental disaster was uncovered off the California coast after 70 years

The lasting effects of DDT contamination are killing an alarming number of California sea lions.
www.cbsnews.com www.cbsnews.com
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Jan Libourel said:
Yes, I have been somewhat aware of this bad business for some time. I am sure we all hope a good deal can be done to rectify it.
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turns out its way worse than everyone thought

earther.gizmodo.com

25,000 Barrels of Suspected DDT Found Off the California Coast

A known DDT dump site off the coast of Southern California is considerably larger than suspected, in a discovery that’s sounding the alarm bells. Research by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography shows thousands of potentially toxic barrels on the seafloor.
earther.gizmodo.com earther.gizmodo.com
 
Rambo said:
www.theguardian.com

‘Killing spree’: Wisconsin’s wolf population plunges after protections removed, study finds

Researchers blame poaching and hunting far beyond quotas after species dropped from endangered list
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

midwesterners really fucking hate wolves
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I believe antipathy to wolves increases exponentially with proximity. Urban nature lovers love them as symbols the "free wild." People who live in wolf country hate and fear them. I personally think they're neat animals, and I cheer their survival and increase. However, they are most unlikely to be prowling the streets of East Long Beach anytime soon, which is just as well with me.
 
Guess what I saw on my bike ride this afternoon...

www.dutchnews.nl

Delft and The Hague take action against American crayfish invader - DutchNews.nl

Delft and The Hague’s water boards have launched a plan to map the occurrence of Procambarus clarkii, or red swamp crayfish, which has invaded Dutch rivers and ditches, public broadcaster NOS reports. The crayfish, thought to have travelled from their native United States in the ballast tanks of...
www.dutchnews.nl www.dutchnews.nl

IMG_2638.jpg
 
^Well, a mess of "crawdads" can make some mighty fine eatin'. Taste much like lobster, they do, unsurprisingly since they more or less are little freshwater lobsters. As the article points out, if the Dutch public realize this, any problems posed by these exotics should quickly disappear!
 
Jan Libourel said:
I believe antipathy to wolves increases exponentially with proximity. Urban nature lovers love them as symbols the "free wild." People who live in wolf country hate and fear them. I personally think they're neat animals, and I cheer their survival and increase. However, they are most unlikely to be prowling the streets of East Long Beach anytime soon, which is just as well with me.
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Very much true. Having spent the majority of my life in wolf country, I have no idea why they are almost universally hated and feared here. The last person to be killed by wolves in my country was in 1867, and he was a 6-year-old boy who got lost in the woods.

The suburban vegan/ hippie/ green types claim to love them, but the same people get a shitfit of panic if even a deer stumbles onto the streets of the capital city.

I myself donate to a wolf conservation organisation each month.
 
Well, when you won't tolerate large predators in your vicinity--and most people won't--you're going have to endure problems with unwelcome wildlife or else kill 'em yourself. I've mentioned recently in this thread that deer have become downright pests over many parts of the USA for similar reasons. We don't want to tolerate wolves and mountain lions, and there aren't enough hunters. Many areas are too densely settled to permit the use of firearms anyway.
 
Well, when I just said, "We don't want to tolerate...mountain lions," maybe I misspoke. This weekend, near the town of Calabasas, CA, a subadult lion attacked a five-year-old boy. Fortunately, the lion was small enough that the boy's mother drove it off with her fists, and it was subsequently shot. What makes this ironic is that the do-gooders are building a $170 million wildlife overpass across the 101 Freeway so that more mountain lions can enter the Santa Monica Mountains. Ironically, it will be very near Calabasas. I wonder whether this incident may incite some local feeling against the overpass.

California now has about 6,000 mountain lions, about ten times as many as when I was a young man. Our state is the mountain lion and black bear capital of the world!
 
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