The Austringer

Meijer ends Humane Society contest after sportsmen complain - Latest News - The Grand Rapids Press - MLive.com

Meijer is a grocer/retailer that operates in the Midwest. Recently, they offered customers the opportunity to donate a $1 towards a $5,000 goal for a donation to aid people who have pets and whose homes have been foreclosed upon.

Sounds OK, doesn’t it?

The problem is that a couple of layers underneath that bright, shiny surface, one finds the poser group HSUS (”Humane Society of the United States”) as the folks being aided by the donations. HSUS is a radical animal rights organization masquerading as an animal welfare group. From the name on, they borrow legitimacy from the hard work and effort of local shelters and the national 130-year-old animal welfare group, the American Humane Association.

The US Sportsmen’s Alliance, a hunting advocacy group, criticized Meijer for its donation plan. Meijer decided to truncate the donation period in response.

Meijer Inc. ducked Monday after finding itself in the cross hairs of a national hunting group over donations to help families and pets going through foreclosure.

The Foreclosure Pets Fund is run by the Humane Society of the United States — an organization the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance charges is anti-hunting.

I’ve noted before the problem of animal rights groups feeding off legitimate concerns of animal welfare:

This isn’t to say that the fakes haven’t gotten on the bandwagon of pushing legitimate reforms already suggested by animal welfare advocates. But their participation is best considered a form of crypsis, since they have an agenda that goes far beyond the laudable aims of animal welfare.

Support animal welfare. Don’t get conned by animal rights groups trying to disguise themselves as animal welfare advocates.

Essentially, the radical animal rights groups appear to be implementing a plan to become the only voices for animal welfare, though their aims go much further than those of legitimate animal welfare groups. The radical animal rights groups want an end to any human “exploitation” of animals, and that includes pet ownership and the extinction of domesticated animal species, as well as any take of wild animals for any reason. Eating meat is right out. Hunting and fishing are targets. Biomedical research using animal models would be history. However, selling the general public on those goals is not a public relations winner right now. How would Meijer, Inc. care to contemplate a grocery store without milk, butter, eggs, meat, fish, or any other animal-based product? How would Meijer customers take it? That’s right, no sale. On the other hand, animal welfare is an incredibly popular idea and causes people to open up their wallets for charitable giving. There’s only some much money in the animal welfare charitable giving pot, though, and those pesky folks running the local animal shelters and the AHA as the national organization for them are soaking up quite a bit of that money. If, though, a radical animal rights group spends enough money on a public relations campaign to “own” some particular animal welfare issue, they can get most of the money that gets donated by people interested in that cause, say shutting down puppy mills or, as in current events, aiding pet owners in financial straits. That money does not go to the local shelter or the AHA, and they are able to do less in making progress on those animal welfare concerns, making them appear less effective than the disguised radical animal rights groups, causing a further shift in charitable giving toward the radicals.

Many of the comments following the news item linked at the top take issue with Meijer and those against the donation scheme as unfairly depriving the people at the end of the charitable giving chain, the pet-owning foreclosed, of needed funds. They simply don’t understand how having the cash flow go through a radical animal rights organization is a problem. They note the activism and enthusiasm of these groups for specific animal welfare issues and call it “good, good, good”. The problem is that, just like a legitimate front organization for the Mafia, that’s not all that is going on. If we are going to have our established animal welfare groups, locally and nationally, it is they who need to be able to receive our limited donations, and not the radical animal rights groups who are seeking to displace and silence them.

Oxygen depletion: A new form of ocean habitat loss

We take breathing for granted. And especially we take the availability of oxygen for granted. For air-breathing animals, things are relatively simple on the physics. If there is adequate ventilation, the air is comprised of about one-fifth oxygen, and only things like altitude really impinge on how well that can be utilized. The relevant principle for we air-breathing sorts is partial pressure, and for everybody but folks on mountains and those flying at high altitudes, it simply isn’t a matter of much thought or import.

Once one goes aquatic, though, things are different. Oxygen tension is highly dependent upon a number of factors, including salinity and temperature. Of the non-biotic factors, temperature is the most important. And temperature is the thing at issue when we are talking about climate change. Relatively small changes in temperature can trigger fish kill situations, though for most people large scale death of fish is most commonly associated with biotic anoxia through agents like algal and dinoflagellate blooms.

The research linked above looks at the abiotic issue of declining oxygen tension due to increasing temperature. And that, in turn, is linked to climate change.

Scientists confirm computer model predictions that oxygen-depleted zones in tropical oceans are expanding, possibly because of climate change

An international team of physical oceanographers including a researcher from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego has discovered that oxygen-poor regions of tropical oceans are expanding as the oceans warm, limiting the areas in which predatory fishes and other marine organisms can live or enter in search of food.

As the title says, this is yet another aspect of habitat loss. Where oxygen tension drops, fish may either have to leave or die, and over broad enough areas, leaving just isn’t an option. The study also discusses how low-oxygen tension waters can be carried into coastal areas, creating problems for all sorts of organisms dependent upon a continuous supply of oxygen in the water. As global warming progresses, the regions of low oxygen tension enlarge and more often are carried to coastal areas. This adds yet another stress to already decimated fisheries.

Oxygen is not omnipresent in aquatic and marine environments. As the temperature goes up, the places where enough oxygen can be found in the water for fish and other species of commercial interest goes down. Though the physics is more complex than for air-breathers, the situation just comes down to managing to keep in places where the oxygen stays high enough, all the time. It just will be getting tougher as the heat rises.

Fishing throws targeted species off balance, Scripps study shows

Back on my birthday in 2006, I had a post about fishing as a cause of evolution in fish stocks. The linked article at the top of this post dances around the implication, saying that fishing makes the age structure of a population “dynamic” and “unstable”, but they keep a relentlessly ecology-only mindset on the issue. Nonetheless, the answer remains the same so far as regulatory policy is concerned.

Fishing typically extracts the older, larger members of a targeted species and fishing regulations often impose minimum size limits to protect the smaller, younger fishes.

“That type of regulation, which we see in many sport fisheries, is exactly wrong,” said Sugihara. “It’s not the young ones that should be thrown back, but the larger, older fish that should be spared. Not only do the older fish provide stability and capacitance to the population, they provide more and better quality offspring.”

If you want a population to produce bigger fish, you need to stop taking the very biggest fish available.

Warning buoys for right whales installed along Massachusetts Bay

Chris Clarke and the Ornithology Lab at Cornell University have an application for bioacoustics: right whale detection in shipping lanes. Right whales often make contact calls, called “up-calls”, and a series of ten deployed buoys with hydrophones and communications gear can pick up these calls for right whales within five miles of a listening buoy. Onboard processing does a first pass at picking out a “top ten” list of possible right whale calls, and those are uploaded to the Cornell Ornithology Lab for further processing. The system is computer-assisted rather than computer-automated, meaning that the computer processing narrows the things that would require a human decision, but it relies upon humans to make a final determination of whether a right whale call was present. If that is the case, the buoy is marked as having one or more right whales in the vicinity, and is tagged as having an “alert” status. This is reflected on a website that ship captains can access and, hopefully, reduce their speed while traversing areas where right whales have been detected. Right whales move slowly, travel near the surface, and ship strikes remain a major source of mortality for right whales. By highlighting where right whales are, Clarke hopes that responsible captains will take steps to reduce ship speed and post lookouts.

Hawk attack at Fenway Park - Boston.com

A teenager moved too close or too fast near a nesting red-tailed hawk in Fenway Park and collected a bonk and talon scratch on the noggin because of it. A photographer caught a series of still photos of the incident.

The article notes that the nest and egg were removed at the request of officials. I called the Boston Animal Rescue League, the folks noted as having done that task. I asked whether the hawk had been moved with its nest. They said no, and that the nest had no viable eggs in it, so the hawk was not moved.

Update: I just had an idea. For parks like Fenway that like the idea of raptors living on-hand to help control the rodent population, but who freak out when interactions like the incident of the article occur, it might be good to provide specific nesting platforms that would put the raptors out of the way of the humans, but keep them near the site for hunting. Nesting platform construction doesn’t have to be expensive, and has been used successfully for other raptor species. If a nest needs to be moved from walkways or other parts of the park, then there would be nearby places to put it.

I mentioned in a previous post that we picked up a bunch of quail for training our Hungarian pointer (Vizsla), Ritka. Yesterday, Diane went out to the bird house we have for quail, chukar, and pigeons to collect a couple of quail. She discovered that an extra bird had gotten into the house, presumably through the pigeon door bobs: a Cooper’s hawk. It was helping itself to dinner in the form of one of the quail. We had to kill that quail; raptors are not always considerate of niceties like whether the prey item they are munching on is actually dead or not. I’m not sure what would have ensued if the Cooper’s hawk had been stuck in the house after its meal, since the pigeon door bobs are designed for one-way access. Would it have ended up perched next to the chukar? We don’t know exactly.

In any case, Diane managed to extract the Cooper’s hawk from the bird house. Somewhere in there, the Cooper’s hawk attached itself firmly to Diane’s right breast. This is something that you really don’t want to try at home. It took a while for it to decide that it could let go. Once we had the Cooper’s hawk free and clear of tender body parts, I got a few pictures. These will illustrate something about the nickname for these birds, “blue streak”. I set the camera to program mode, upping the bias for higher shutter speeds, set crop mode, and put it in continuous high-speed mode. With those settings, I expect to get 8 frames per second. First, a couple pics of bird in the hand:

Now for the release… These are all the photos I have that have some part of the Cooper’s hawk in the frame. Mind you, I set up to capture frames quickly and was prepared to try to follow movement… and I failed. The blue streak is nothing if not fast.

There you have it. Instead of a long series showing the blue streak flying off into the sunset, I have about one second’s worth of it flying right out of the frame while I futilely try to keep up.

Diane’s impression at the time was that the Cooper’s hawk took a couple of flaps in the time it took for it to leave the immediate vicinity. The sequence of photos is telling me something different. Notice that the hawk’s wings are in almost the same position in every frame? I’m taking this to mean that there is almost one complete wingbeat per each photo, or almost 8 wingbeats per second from a standing start. Wow.

CBS Sports reports that Tripp Isenhour is being charged with killing a red-shouldered hawk on a golf course. Apparently, the hawk was making noise while Isenhour was trying to perform for a video production. It took shot after shot for a while, but Isenhour finally managed to bean the hawk in the head with a golf ball. Neither Isenhour nor any of his production crew figured out that this was a bad idea before he actually managed to fatally injure the hawk.

According to court documents, Isenhour got upset when a red-shouldered hawk began making noise, forcing another take. He began hitting balls at the bird, then 300 yards away, but gave up. Isenhour started again when the hawk moved within about 75 yards, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officer Brian Baine indicated in a report.

Isenhour allegedly said, “I’ll get him now,” and aimed for the hawk.

“About the sixth ball came very near the bird’s head, and (Isenhour) was very excited that it was so close,” Baine wrote.

A few shots later, witnesses said he hit the hawk. The bird, protected as a migratory species, fell to the ground bleeding from both nostrils.

Back in 2006, there was the Orlando golf course that called in the USDA to kill a red-shouldered hawk. Is there something about golf that turns people’s brains off? [Looking back, that golf course was the "Villas of Grand Cypress"; this one is called "Grand Cypress". Does anyone know if this is actually the same facility? -- WRE]

Update: The story expands to unveil another seamy aspect of human behavior, this time in the form of parasitic attention-seeking. Unable to interest people in the core issue of severing all ties between humans and domesticated species, animal rights groups desperately latch onto just about any incident that might be somewhat more broadly respectable and milk it. Poser-group “Humane Society of the United States”, whose name even was chosen to illicitly borrow credibility from the far older animal welfare groups that actually ran pet shelters and did good work in countering cruelty to animals, has jumped on the Isenhour incident with all the unseemly haste of a junkie going for a dropped wallet. Why the San Francisco Chronicle chose an enabling role by putting that non-news action in their lead sentence on the story remains a mystery.

An animal rights group wants the PGA Tour to take action against player Tripp Isenhour, facing charges for hitting a hawk with a golf shot because it was making noise as he videotaped a TV show.

I wouldn’t mind if the PGA Tour wanted to add on some penalties to obvious idiocy on the part of high-profile people in golf. But that’s what makes this such a juicy target for parasitism, since that is likely to be a generally approved-of action.

M-Audio has updated its handheld Microtrack solid-state recorder to the Microtrack II. The specs are attractive. It records in stereo to Compact Flash or MicroDisk format cards, in either WAV or MP3 formats. It can record at up to 96 kilosamples/second at 24 bits per sample. It has both 1/4″ and 1/8″ microphone/line inputs, and can provide 48V phantom power to microphones. Interfacing this unit to hydrophones should be a piece of cake. NCSE has one of the M-Audio Microtrack recorders for making high-quality podcasts or audio documents.

Back in 2005, Diane and I had to come up with a programmable field recorder on three weeks notice. We went with a PDA-based solution using Core Audio’s Compact Flash format audio input card, coupled with Core Audio’s microphone pre-amp/digitizer system. If you need progammability, as for making unattended scheduled acoustic sampling, that’s still a good solution. On the other hand, for interactive recording, the M-Audio Microtrack II offers the convenience of a smaller, discrete package to use, plus you only have to worry about one power supply. The M-Audio unit is about the same size as a standard PDA, though a bit thicker. Core Audio does sell the MicroTrack II, and sees it as aimed at a different market segment than their PDAudio system.

As with any pro-quality system, though, it is pricey. The MSRP on the Microtrack II is about $500. Sweetwater is advertising them at about $300. As such, it is out of range of our budget at the moment. That’s not a whole lot more than one might pay for a top-end media player these days, though, and I can always hope for a price drop.

Bush allows Navy to continue sonar use (OneNewsNow.com)

President Bush signed off on an exemption so that the US Navy can argue for continuing to use mid-frequency sonar systems in training exercises off the coast of southern California. While there is still a court injunction, the article notes that this exemption strengthens the Navy’s position in pushing for use of the mid-frequency sonar during exercises, and everyone will be back in court soon to hash this out.

The article quotes the following:

“The president’s action is an attack on the rule of law,” said Joel Reynolds, director of the council’s Marine Mammal Protection Project. “By exempting the Navy from basic safeguards under both federal and state law, the president is flouting the will of Congress, the decision of the California Coastal Commission and a ruling by the federal court.”

The Navy has long held that its compliance with various and sundry rules and regulations is voluntary. Mr. Reynolds should know by now that the Navy’s end move is to tell everybody to get stuffed, and do what they were planning to do anyway. The real trick here is to advance, so far as possible, the cause of minimizing damage to marine mammal stocks due to Navy actions, while not doing so in such a way as to cause the Navy to stop listening altogether to environmental activists or more moderate voices for conservation. The rhetoric in the above quote isn’t helpful in this regard. The idiom about one may as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb applies here.

And the long-standing tactic in environmental activism of confusing and conflating the different systems of sonar that the Navy uses doesn’t help with the current situation, either. While the general public may be impressed, the people in the Navy tasked with dealing with these issues certainly aren’t put in a good position when research results about one type of sonar are falsely used to argue that the Navy should stop using either other types of sonar, or all sonar systems. There has been some improvement on this score over the years, but things could be better.

There are real problems to be solved concerning the responsible use of military sonar. Getting to the point where solutions are possible is going to be tricky; the Navy does have a legitimate purpose for use of these systems that has not gone away, and there are also legitimate concerns about balancing the Navy’s use of these systems with the risk that they pose for marine mammal stocks. The viewpoint that the Navy might be somehow barred from use simply isn’t feasible, and the possibility that the Navy might stop interacting with civilian interest groups of various sorts to find that appropriate point of balance would be unacceptable.

Hat tip to Ed Brayton.

Here’s a blog post recounting an encounter between a hawk (species unspecified), a chihuahua, and its owner. The owner managed to get the hawk to let go of the dog, though the dog sustained some severe injuries. The comments also bring out some anti-hawk sentiment.

A little natural history for you folks: it’s winter now. Hawks, such as the red-tailed hawk, have high juvenile mortality. Estimates run upwards of 80% of all first-year birds will not survive to next spring. So, you have a bunch of starving hawks out there, often living near humans, since we have co-opted so much of their range (see “habitat loss”). Red-tailed hawks are buteos; these birds prey on small mammals. People with toy dogs shouldn’t be too surprised when a starving hawk decides that it is worth a try to get a small mammal under less than ideal circumstances. That includes getting close to people.

The hawk that failed to make a meal out of the chihuahua? Odds are that it is dead by now, if not solely from starvation, perhaps also from injuries sustained during the dog owner’s counter-attack. For the commenter saying that he “hates hawks”, this is probably a comforting thought that so many of them are dying as we speak. The chihuahua, at 2 pounds, 5 ounces, most likely outweighed the hawk attacking it, especially if it was already malnourished.

I guess what I’d like to communicate is that we still live in a world with wildlife. If you have a small mammal as a pet, part of your responsibility is to realize that starvation makes both people and wildlife desperate. A little forethought concerning when and where one lets a toy dog outside is just something you need to invest. Close supervision of your companion outside through the winter months is the strongest deterrent you have to communicate to a raptor that it should spend its time looking for different prey.

Scotsman.com News - Scotland - Spiky issue solved for Hamish the hedgehog

The fluffy, feel-good news story relates how a rail company in Scotland responded to a resident’s request to take into account access past the rail line for a hedgehog when performing maintenance on a wall. The company responded with a hedgehog-sized throughway in the new wall.

COLIN Seddon, manager of the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’ wildlife centre at Middlebank, said it was becoming increasingly important to consider the effect on animals of human developments.

“We are moving further and further out into their territory so we have to do everything we can to make life easier for them,” he said. “We are invading their land, so we have to give something back.”

Well, the fact is that human development subdivides more than just lots in residential areas. As humans work out the most economical ways to connect things up, we arbitrarily restrict the movement of wild animals, and even plants. For each one-off solution to a noticed problem, we tend to overlook building in solutions to lots of unnoticed ones. This is a one-two punch for wildlife; first, there is the outright loss of habitat claimed by humans in development. Each time a home goes up, that plot of land is no longer available for the endemic wildlife to use. Second, when we connect together our separated developments with roads, pipelines for water and sewer services, rail lines, or separate apart property with fences, walls, ditches, mounds, and the like, we curtail the usual and normal means of access that wildlife has with other parts of the same population. “Habitat loss” is the usual term for the first, and it is easily remembered. The second part, though, comes under the daunting rubric of “vicariance biogeography”. Even though the term is a bit on the clunky side, the results from the science are pretty easily comprehended.

Vicariance refers to the events that split taxa. Vicariance biogeography takes as its field the geographical splitting of populations and the resulting patterns of phylogeny. A 1967 book by Edward O. Wilson and Robert MacArthur, “The Theory of Island Biogeography”, got things rolling, and a generalized appreciation for how barriers to intermixing of populations across geographical ranges impacts diversity followed. The short version is that introducing effective barriers that create non-mixing subpopulations reduces diversity and increases the likelihood that populations will go extinct.

On small scales, we see things like “mouse islands”, where interstate clover-leaf engineering puts small patches of green-space within a zone that is effectively lethal to mammalian predators that take rodents. Other than the occasional raptor, the rodents are fairly safe within the confines of a clover-leaf circle. But transfer of genetic material is strictly curtailed; even getting to the “mouse island” in the next clover-leaf over is a highly risky endeavor. These small micro-environments tend to support only depauperate diversity of wildlife, perhaps a couple of rodent species and whatever grass and plant species the road landscapers permit.

But there’s a lot of land that is not next to things like interstate highways. However, at the scale of highways, we see the same pattern emerging. Crossing those barriers is abnormally risky, so they create subpopulations with reduced gene flow on either side. These make for ready application of vicariance biogeography. In wildlife, it isn’t “divide and conquer”, it’s “divide and lose diversity”.

I’m sorry to put a damper on the holiday cheer for the resolution of the plight of Hamish the Hedgehog. The problems for wildlife created by both habitat loss and ignoring the lessons of vicariance biogeography are not the sort that have win-win solutions. Addressing either requires that humans do things that are costly to do. Fixing the problems we are experiencing is going to require addressing both. Making accommodations for an individual family of hedgehogs is a good thing, but we shouldn’t lie to ourselves that we have come to terms with our relationship with wildlife with these small gestures of limited scope.

An AP report says that the UK’s Prince Harry and a companion were questioned by police concerning the shooting of two “hen harriers” at the royal residence at Sandrignham.

Harry and a friend, who were in the area at the time of the alleged shooting, were questioned by police but knew nothing about the incident, according to Buckingham Palace.

Norfolk Constabulary, which is investigating the hawks’ deaths, said Wednesday they questioned three people in connection with incident.

Prince Harry, his friend, and the person who reported the shooting makes three.

Hen harriers prey on grouse, which makes them unpopular with hunters, which leads to the current state of affairs where the harriers are threatened and only 160 nesting females remain.

Whale beached in Galveston fighting to stay alive | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

The Texas Marine Mammal Stranding Network has a live stranding once again, this time a dwarf sperm whale calf. Both the mother and calf came ashore as a tropical storm hit Galveston on Saturday, but the mother died.

Diane and I did volunteer work with the TMMSN while we lived in Galveston, from 1994 to 1998. While the live stranded animals get the press response, as in this current case of the dwarf sperm whale calf, TMMSN recovers many, many dead stranded animals for every live stranding that happens. Dr. Dan Cowan of University of Texas Medical Branch does necropsies on the dead animals to obtain further information about the health status of marine mammals in the Gulf of Mexico.

But when a live stranding happens, TMMSN has to mobilize squads of volunteers for around-the-clock care of the stranded animal. Veterinary care is arranged, and the logistics of setting up a recovery tank, maintaining its water quality, and providing an appropriate diet have to be done, and done quickly. Live strandings are uncommon and full rehabilitation and release are pretty rare. Generally, cetaceans have to be pretty ill or disoriented to end up as stranded animals. There is a lot of Texas coastline, so one would expect prompt response only in the case of stranding along fairly popular areas. In the present case, the stranding took place at Jamaica Beach, a small town on the west end of Galveston Island, and during the summer vacation season.

TMMSN and other marine mammal stranding organizations around the country could use financial help to do their job. If you have the means, please do contribute. If you are in the Galveston area, consider volunteering with TMMSN. They will need pretty much everyone available to fill out schedules during a live stranding.

While Diane is visiting her parents in Florida, I’m taking care of the various critters. After I finished the rounds this evening, I took a walk down to the pond. The day has been overcast, and we got some sprinkled rain earlier. Down where we had sand put in next to the dock, I could see that either several deer or one very active one had been by.

I went slowly out to the end of the dock. Looking around, I finally spotted six ducks at the southwest end. They spotted me, too, and flew off about thirty seconds after I arrived. The water level has dropped to about two and a half feet below the level of the dock. Back in late March, water almost covered the dock’s surface. I spent a couple of minutes there watching the water. I had wondered whether I would be able to spot turtles, or even if our small pond might have them, and I was rewarded with a definite sighting of about an eight-inch long pond slider-like turtle coming up to take a breath about ten feet away.

That’s about all I had time for today. I’m still working up overdue stuff.

Here’s another view of the mantis from a couple of weeks ago:

And here is a picture taken yesterday down at the pond:

I briefly saw the ducks, too; a group of about eight ducks flew off as soon as I approached the pond. The geese hung around until Diane and Ritka arrived, then decided to leave, too.

Judge Limits Navy Sonar, Citing a Threat to Wildlife - New York Times

The US Navy has been barred from using its mid-frequency sonar systems in naval exercises off of southern California. The Natural Resources Defense Council sought the injunction.

The reporting on this issue has improved over time. It used to be that reporters did not distinguish between different sonar systems, and various environmental groups exploited that vagueness to argue that “Navy sonar” harmed cetaceans. Some sonar systems deployed by the US Navy, and other navies around the world, do have a record of harming certain taxa of cetaceans, but others do not. The article leads off,

A federal judge on Monday ordered the Navy to stop using medium-range sonar in training exercises off Southern California, saying that the Navy’s own assessments predicted that dozens of marine mammals, particularly deep-diving whales, could be harmed by the intense sound waves.

There are two apparent vaguenesses or inaccuracies in the above. It is unclear whether the reporter introduced them, or simply passed them on from a confused court. There is the distinction made about “medium-range sonar”; this is an odd way to refer to mid-frequency sonar systems, which are the ones implicated in various stranding incidents involving cetaceans. Then there is the “predicted that dozens of marine mammals, particularly deep-diving whales, could be harmed” part of the sentence. Does this refer to the number of individuals, and under what circumstances does that prediction hold? How many different species might be included? The previous sonar-related stranding incidents showed a particular sensitivity of whales in the genera Ziphius and Mesoplodon (the beaked whales, which are deep divers); are these the ones referred to here? It’s tough to tell.

There’s something else odd in the article. Consider these two paragraphs,

The Navy has argued that without training on this widely used system, sailors’ ability to detect enemy vessels is severely hampered. Active sonar, at various frequencies, has been developed over the past two decades as diesel engines on military craft became quieter and harder to detect with passive sonar.

Donald R. Schregardus, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for the environment, said, “The decision puts sailors and marines at risk by ordering the Navy to stop critical antisubmarine warfare training while we complete environmental impact statements on our training ranges.”

Active sonar used for sinking subs dates back to World War II. Now, I doubt that any of the systems developed then are still in use by the US Navy, but “active sonar” as a class of equipment does have a much longer history. In fact, one of the beaked whale mass stranding events associated with mid-frequency sonar was back in the early 1960s (1962 or 63, IIRC), which considerably predates “over the past two decades”. But the real stinker in the first of those quoted paragraphs is, “as diesel engines on military craft became quieter and harder to detect with passive sonar”. That, coupled with the topic identified in the second paragraph of “antisubmarine warfare”, indicates massive confusion somewhere in the construction of the article. First off, most of the submarines of interest don’t use diesel engines. Unless we are concerned about Brazil’s submarine fleet, we aren’t primarily trying to detect the presence of diesel-powered subs. What has gotten much better in the way of submarine running gear is the propeller. Remember the flap over Toshiba trading with the USSR? What the USSR got was computer-controlled machining equipment that would allow them to manufacture submarine propellers to extremely fine tolerances, reducing cavitation and turbulence, and thus making their subs much, much quieter. That’s why the Navy has an interest in active sonar systems.

It’s pretty easy, actually. Real humane societies and shelters are affiliated with animal welfare organizations, like the 130-year-old American Humane Association, whose mission statement reads:

Mission

The mission of the American Humane Association, as a network of individuals and organizations, is to prevent cruelty, abuse, neglect, and exploitation of children and animals and to assure that their interests and well-being are fully, effectively, and humanely guaranteed by an aware and caring society.

American Humane envisions a nation where no child or animal will ever be a victim of willful abuse or neglect. As a recognized leader in professional education, training and advocacy, research and evaluation, American Humane joins with other similarly missioned individuals and organizations to make this vision a reality.

Fakes, though, are affiliated with animal rights organizations, like the misleadingly named Humane Society of the United States. That group is notorious for cashing in on the good reputation of the American Humane Association (AHA), even though HSUS is a far more recently organized outfit and didn’t have a thing to do with the successes of the AHA. This isn’t to say that the fakes haven’t gotten on the bandwagon of pushing legitimate reforms already suggested by animal welfare advocates. But their participation is best considered a form of crypsis, since they have an agenda that goes far beyond the laudable aims of animal welfare.

Support animal welfare. Don’t get conned by animal rights groups trying to disguise themselves as animal welfare advocates.

I got up this morning and headed out to my desk in the living room. Somewhere in there I realized that I had company. A very green mantis was perched on my printer. Fortunately, he was perched on a piece of paper, so I was able to move him outside without a whole lot of fuss.

Nikon D2Xs, Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 lens, ISO 800.

Yesterday, Diane, Ritka, Farli, and I went out in the back area beyond the fenced yard here. I wasn’t paying particular attention to Ritka, but Ritka had found some interesting scent. Our attention was caught, though, when a half-dozen birds broke cover and flew off, the smallest of them as large as a full-grown pheasant. We have wild turkey in the area. The smaller birds we are assuming are young of the year.

Down at the pond, there is a mallard hen with a half-dozen half-grown ducklings. We had a load of sand dropped off next to the pier at the pond, giving us a few feet of sandy beach rather than mud. It makes it a bit more pleasant to check out what’s up. We can hear frogs toward evening. And we have had a fair number of lightning bugs, too.

There’s some discussion in the comments of an article earlier on concerning Cooper’s hawks and pigeons, so I thought a couple of pics of Cooper’s hawks would be appropriate.

This Cooper’s hawk is being rehabilitated at the Marin County raptor facility at Hawk Hill. Despite regulations, many raptors are killed and injured every year by people who shoot at them or trap them without permits. This Cooper’s hawk was fortunate; its injuries were not permanently debilitating and it was released shortly after I took this picture.

This Cooper’s hawk was a frequent visitor to our backyard, where he kept a close eye on our pigeon loft. He took quite a few of our young pigeons as they were learning to fly. I was perhaps thirty feet away when I took this picture; it isn’t often that you can get that close to a wild raptor on a perch.

Fuji S2 Pro camera, Nikkor AFS VR 70-200mm f/2.8 lens for both pictures, IIRC.