Saturday, March 13, 2021

This day marks

THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-FIVE DAYS of hearty, and joyful howling on Sherwood brought to you by the Sherwood Howlers.

THREE HUNDRED AND THIRRTY-FIVE DAYS.

ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY JUST AROUND THE CORNER. BIG CELEBRATION COMING. THIRTY DAYS AND COUNTING.

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I am in mourning.

Tonight I am howling for the

GREY WOLVES OF THE UNITED STATES.

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As a parting gift to environmentalists, wild animal lovers, and in particular grey wolf lovers, in November 2020 the Trump administration decided to end longstanding federal safeguards for gray wolves in the Lower 48 states except for a small population of Mexican gray wolves in the Southwest. The decision allows wolf hunting to resume in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

Soon thereafter, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) issued a permit to a bunch of blood thirsty barbarians for a hunt to kill 119 wolves. The hunt took place during the period February 22 through February 28 of this year.

Expert wolf biologists say that the DNR disregarded years of scientific studies on the intrinsic and economic importance of sustaining a healthy wolf population They also say DNR used a scientifically questionable means of determining the number of wolves to be euthanized. In my view of the world “murdered” is a better word.

These model Wisconsin citizens went on a rampage and slaughtered 216 of these magnificent creatures, far exceeding the hunt limit. That is what blood lust looks like.

How did they do it?

Trapping, snaring, and using trained hounds (a wolf’s cousin) to relentlessly pursue the wolves throughout the night then dispatching them at gunpoint.  That is how. The wolves did not have a fighting chance.

Many of the dead wolves were pregnant females. Two for the price of one.

Everybody had a time. The proud hunters took selfies of themselves smiling and admiring their dead trophies.

Just so you know this is not a partisan issue, the Obama administration removed grey wolves from the federal endangered species list, pursuant to the Endangered Species Act, but the band on hunting was still in place until Trump.

This issue is complicated. Some wolves will kill livestock, but they generally take weakened or sick animals. They do it for food, not blood lust. Go figure.

There has to be a better way.

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Gray wolves have recovered from near extinction in parts of the country with thousands now roaming the northern Rocky Mountains and western Great Lakes region and growing numbers of the animals in the Pacific Northwest. But they remain absent from much of their historical range and wildlife advocates have said protections still are needed.

The lives of Wisconsin’s wolf families have been forever altered and the impacts will be wide-ranging, overlapping into other states and wolf policy. In other words, the slaughter will likely continue.

Learn more about wolves and wolf conservation at

https://nywolf.org/

The Wolf Conservation Center

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TONIGHT JOIN ME TO HOWLING THESE DEAD WOLVES INTO WOLF HEAVEN.

HOWL TILL YOUR HACKLES DO THE TANGO.

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SIXTY SECOND NATURAL HISTORY NOTE

North American aquafers.

Aquifers are subterranean catchment basins found in layers of rock saturated with ground water. They are one of the most important sources of water on Earth. Aquifers are found in porous, permeable rock such as sandstone or limestone.  They get their water through seepage of surface water into underground basins. A major source of water in many North American aquifers was the vast ice fields and glaciers of past time. As these sources of fresh water melted the water collected in these basins. Old water. Fossil water.

The 174,000 square mile Ogallala Aquifer also known as the Great Plains Aquifer, got most of its water in this way. Most of Nebraska and portions of Wyoming, South Dakota, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas are underlain by this vast water source. The Ogallala Aquafer supplies almost one-third of America’s total agricultural groundwater, and more than 1.8 million people rely on it for their drinking water.

And guess what. It is going away. By 2030 many scientists say it will be dry.

This region, being semiarid to arid, does not get enough annual precipitation to recharge the aquafer as quickly as we withdraw from it. Water pumped for agriculture, cities, golf courses, lawns, and swimming pools far surpasses recharge.

2030 is not that far out.

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American Travels

A Story About Aquafers and Other Stuff

Day 96 – Road Trip, 09/22/2018

Early this morning we left the Bureau of Land Management Valley of Fires National Recreation Area bound for Dalhart Texas, smack dab in the middle of the Ogallala Aquafer. Dust Bowl country. We pass through New Mexico ghost towns, Robsart (population 6 ghosts), Coyote (population 10 ghosts), Gallinas (population 12 ghosts), and Corona (population 165 live people). In Corona we talked to a couple of Mescalero Apaches drinking Corona beer who said they were ghosts, but you know you can’t believe a thing those Apaches say.

We go through more New Mexico hamlets, Duran (population 35), Vaughn (population 446), Pastura (population 23) and finally pull into Santa Rosa (population 2,850) where we have a tolerable meal at Joseph’s Bar and Grill. On to Cuervo (population 10 ghosts), Montoya (population 8 ghosts and 3 living souls) and finally into Tucumcari (population 5,365 living people, about half of which are “Little Feat” fans.

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I been warped by the rain, driven by the snow
I’m drunk and dirty don’t ya know, and I’m still, oh I’m still willin’
Out on the road late at night, I seen my pretty Alice in every head light
Alice, Dallas Alice

I’ve been from Tuscon to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonapah
Driven every kind of rig that’s ever been made
Now I driven the back roads so I wouldn’t get weighed
And if you give me: weed, whites, and wine
and you show me a sign
I’ll be willin’, to be movin’

Now I smuggled some smokes and folks from Mexico
baked by the sun, every time I go to Mexico, and I’m still willin’
And I’ve been kicked be the wind, robbed by the sleet
Had my head stoved in and I’m still on my feet and I’m willin’, oh I’m willin’

And I been from Tuscon to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonapah
Driven every kind of rig that’s ever been made
Driven the back roads so I wouldn’t get weighed
And if you give me: weed, whites, and wine
and then you show me a sign
I’ll be willin’, to be movin’ 

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On to Logan (population 1,100) and Nara Vista (population 112), half of which are stoned Little Feat fans.

We came to a fork in the road, so we took it and rode through Amistad, (Spanish for “friendship”, population 40 ghosts) where in 1906, Henry S. Wannamaker, a lonely Congregational minister, placed adds in church newspapers back east to encourage nubile farm girls to homestead near him. To his dismay, very few nubile farm girls responded, but forty other ministers did, intent on converting heathen Indians to Christianity. If you needed to hear a sermon in 1915 Amistad was the place to be. To this day, Little Feat fans, terrified of dead ministers, avoid Amistad like the plague,.

On to Stead (population 0) and then Clayton (population 3,000) where we gas up and buy whiskey, which is lucky for me, because, as the next few hours unfold, it becomes apparent that we are going to need it, lots of it.

We head for the Rita Blanca National Grassland and the town of Felt, OK (population 93). The Forest Service maintains a campground of sorts in Felt where wayward travelers like us can catch a night’s sleep. We arrive in Felt tired and hungry. Nobody else at the campground and nobody else in Felt either. Emily decides to check out the restrooms and comes back with a horrified look on her face.

“Let’s get out of here”, she cried. “The floor of the outhouse and the commode are covered in blood”.

Arriving at a campground and finding the facilities bloodied is not good. We left out quickly. Never saw another person around town. This is the only time on our entire trip we had serious misgivings about staying in a place.

In our travels this summer we visited regions in the Great Plains and Midwest that used to have extensive short and tall grassland prairies, each sporting unique flora and fauna.   Short grass prairies, with blue grama and buffalo grass as dominant species, once covered most of the Great Plains, from the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains and as far east as Nebraska and north into Saskatchewan and large parts of Alberta, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Kansas and the high plains of Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. Hot, dry country. Today existing short grass prairies are a mere shadow of their former selves, isolated remnants, small islands in a vast dry sea given over to modern industrial agriculture.

Tallgrass prairie covered much of the Midwest; grasses like big bluestem, switch grass and Indian grass dominate here. These grasses can grow up to ten feet tall. Long roots, reaching as much as twelve feet deep, allows them to drink long and deep from subterranean water sources. Today less than one percent of those stands exist in America.

Before Anglo influence, somewhere between thirty and sixty million American Bison freely roamed throughout these prairie grass regions. The impact of that many bison on the landscape must have been enormous, but the bison evolved here, along with the landscape and its unique ecology. That co-evolution built in ‘prairie recovery time’. When the bison got a little too overzealous and chowed down too severely in a given place they moved on. Grazing and recovery were cyclic. No fences to impede migration

By 1884 there were three hundred American bison left in America. THREE HUNDRED. Do the math. In about a century white guys slaughtered close to sixty million American Buffalo. They took the sought after tongues and hides and left the carcasses for the vultures.

In recent years dedicated natural resource managers partnered with farmers, conservation groups, various government agencies and nonprofits to increase their numbers. Thanks to them today there are about five hundred thousand American bison in North America, confined to certain national and state parks, private lands, and a few preserves. No longer do the bison freely roam.

Big Problem #1 – Overgrazing

Cattle quickly replaced bison. In the 1860s and 70s cowboys drove their massive herds from Texas to Kansas. In America in the period from 1991 until 2016 there were between 87 and 105 million head of cattle. Those on the Great Plains and in the Midwest approximate the number of bison originally roaming free. But the cattle cause way more damage to the landscape. Cattle overgrazing removes many native prairie plants like prairie violet, pale purple coneflower, false sunflower, lead plant, white prairie clover, showy tick trefoil, prairie blazing star, round-headed bush clover, stiff goldenrod, heath aster, and countless others do as well. The nature of overgrazing means no recovery time for the grasslands.

Perpetually overgrazed lands exist in a state of perpetual ecologic decline. As the native grasses die out, shallow rooted plants like mesquite (not a native plant), thorny weeds, Russian thistle (tumbleweed) and other non-natives replace the native grasses. These plants do not hold the fragile soil in place like the native grasses. The overall effect of overgrazing is a degradation of habitat for birds, amphibians, reptiles, other mammals, insects, spiders, and Little Feat fans.

Big Problem #2 – Water Withdrawal

Settlers intent on farming started irrigating these regions, first by sinking wells into the Ogallala Aquifer, then by building dams, canals, and aqueducts to store and deliver water to the thirsty land. The Ogallala Aquifer, one of the largest aquifers in the world, is a subterranean catchment basin under 174,000 square miles of flat, treeless, hot, dry land in most of Nebraska and portions of Wyoming, South Dakota, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. It is a shallow aquifer, shallow meaning the water is easy to get. At one time it contained lots of water, mostly ‘fossil water’ from several Ice Ages of glacial runoff. Now sparse and paltry annual precipitation is the only recharge mechanism, which amounts to about a half inch gain in water depth a year.

Early settlers reached into it with windmill driver pumps.  No big deal. A few wells here and there. With the advent of the centrifugal pump people could do a hell of a lot more pumping. In short order, people put in thousands of wells throughout the Great Plains and begin drawing the water table down to support agricultural enterprises. Each year in the past two decades draw down rates increased dramatically in the region. Experts say at current withdrawal rates the Ogallala Aquifer might be dry by 2030. Meaning we are taking out more than is going in, much more. The same experts say that it could take at least six thousand years to replenish the aquifer naturally from rainfall. This in a region that produces a substantial amount of the world’s food from ground water irrigation.

Do the math. A day of reckoning is coming.

Settlers plowed and cultivated large land tracts on which to grow all manner of water hungry crop plants. These days, from an airplane flying over the Midwest and Great Plains, one can see bands of thousands of perfect, 133-acre, green circles packed together on irrigated lands, growing corn, alfalfa, sorghum, wheat, and cotton, lots of cotton. The withdrawal of water at the rate needed to irrigate all those crops, a rate much bigger that the natural recharge rate, is, well, dumb.

Big Problem #3. Ground Water Contamination

Because its more efficient to produce marketable beef quicker, cattle growers now confine their livestock in CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations), ‘feed lots’ by another name. Some are as big as ten football stadiums, and often hold a hundred thousand animals or more. Driving by one of these behemoths insults all five senses. And when an infrequent, but severe Midwest summer thunder storm drops five inches of rain on one, it creates a molasses-thick, fetid runoff that would choke a maggot. Guess where that noisome concoction goes. That’s right – into the Ogallala Aquifer.

The hidden cost of a Big Mac.

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The one hundred thousand-acre Rita Blanca National Grassland is a federally designated entity in Oklahoma and Texas. ‘National Grassland’ has a nice ring to it, but it a grassland in name only, like others we saw on this trip. Today ‘grasslands’ are amalgams, patch works of private and public land, mostly private, on which farmers do large scale cattle and dry land and irrigated crop farming. If one looks hard enough one can find small natural grassland remnants and restored areas interspersed among the private holdings. That’s where the coyotes and dead Little Feat fans hang out.

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We go forth in search of camping accommodations in the Rita Blanca National Grassland but there is no room at the inn. There is no inn. Its late, we are tired and hungry. The closest town now is Dalhart, Texas, so away we go to Dalhart, on the western edge of the Texas Panhandle in the flattest, featureless country yet.

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Big Problem #4 – The Dust Bowl

Dalhart, TX (population 7,930), smack dab in the middle of the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s, the ‘Dirty Thirties’ as people called it. The Homestead Act of 1862, which provided settlers with 160 acres of public land, and other similar pieces of legislation designed to get people moving westward led to a massive influx of new and inexperienced farmers across the Great Plains. Charlatans and snollygosters led the settlers to believe that if they just plowed the land, the rains would come. They plowed and plowed and plowed and plowed. The rains did not come. But the top soil surely blew away. Spoiler alert. Plowing up the soil in a desert is the last thing one should do. Plowed up dry soil in arid country plus hot dry winds equals Dust Bowl.

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We come into Dalhart from the north on route 385 at night. We see the lights first. Then lines of stainless steel tankers and tractor trailers coming out of a security fenced wrapped behemoth of a compound.

We creep by in amazement at the sheer size of the place. The trucks coming and going reminds me of a scene in a 1978 remake of the classic movie, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which glassy-eyed, duplicate, alien-controlled humans fill tractor trucks with alien ‘pods’ and deliver them to cities and towns throughout the American hinterlands, where more glassy-eyed alien-controlled humans place them in close proximity to real human beings controlled by the liberal media. The pods hatch to reveal mucus covered, duplicate humans cloned to become Fox News followers. Donald Sutherland is not a good guy in this movie. He was at first, but an alien pod took him over and he becomes a duplicate Roger Ailes.

But it’s not an alien pod plant. It is a billion-dollar cheese processing plant, owned by the California based Hilmar Cheese Company. The Dalhart plant receives over one million gallons of milk daily from a half million cows and daily processes it into hundreds and hundreds of 640-pound blocks of Cheddar, Monterey Jack, Pepper Jack, Colby, Colby Jack, and Mozzarella cheese.

Sounding pretty good right now to a couple of hungry wayfarers.

Besides the cheese farm, the area around Dalhart is laced with farms, ranches, feedlot operations, large-scale pig operations, the largest being a 21,000-acre Cargill owned hog processing facility

That is a lot of pork butt. Hot dogs anyone?

Big Problem #5 – More Pollution into the Ogallala.

The plant uses the milk and lots and lots of water to make the cheese. Guess where the water comes from. That’s right. The Ogallala Aquifer. In fairness the plant returns about 2.2 million gallons of wastewater per day by either injecting it into another aquifer or for irrigation on adjacent agricultural lands, where, once applied, it picks up pesticides and fertilizer and percolates back into the Ogallala.

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We drive deep into the guts of Dalhart, TX and cruise Liberal Street searching for a motel. There has not been a liberal in Texas since Donald Southerland converted all to alien-controlled Fox News followers, so the name of that street is an enigma.

First, we try La Quinta where they want $180 a night. Being the cheap bastard that I am I put my foot down and say no way. Big mistake.

We move down the line to the 3-star Rodeway Inn where a stout, curry covered Eastern Indian woman rented us a dingy cubicle for ninety bucks. By now I really needed a drink, so I went looking for the icemaker. Up on discovering that it was not working I went to the office to lodge a complaint. The curry coated Eastern Indian woman offered a cryptic apology and then cajoled me into following her to the utility room where she implored me to help her fix the wiring that supplied the icemaker and half the window mounted air conditioners in the place. The 1940s fuse box was a medusa of trembling, burnt wires that reminded me of the 1963 movie Jason and the Argonauts, in which Jason and his stoned-out friends search for the Golden Fleece, fighting all manner of fantastical beasts along the way; including the Hydra, a monster with nine Donald Trump orange-haired heads attached to writhing snake bodies; the whole affair looking vaguely like the curry coated Eastern Indian woman motel owner.

According to legend when a reckless Argonaut loped off one Hydra head two more Donald Trump orange-haired heads appeared. That is what this fuse box looked like. A bunch of Trump heads wearing MAGA hats, writhing on snake bodies attached to burnt, undersized fuses with pennies behind them.

No thanks. I respectfully declined the curry coated Eastern Indian woman motel owner’s request and returned to our room to do my yoga exercises and drink warm 86 proof Black Label Evan Williams bourbon. More than I should have as I remember.

All is good. Tomorrow is a new day. New adventures. We are headed home.

Namaste

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COVID 19 IN VIRGINIA, STAUNTON, AND AUGUSTA COUNTY

Today’s Trends and Notes

A continuing rosy picture

1. The state seven day positivity rate is 5.5%. Dropping steadily. Very good news.
2. New cases per capita in Virginia has been dropping steadily for two months, now at 226.
3. For some unexplained reason, the one day case count in Virginia shot up to 4,287, triple from the day before.
4. Augusta County and Staunton’s case curves still trending down.
5. The death count in Virginia shot up to 136 in the past 24 hours.
6. The average 14 day case rate for all localities I follow is still trending down.
7. Virginia’s healthcare providers have administered a total of 2,623,902 vaccinations to date. Yesterday’s (one day) total was 195,002. Almost quadruple the day before. What!
8. The average number of vaccinations per day has risen to 55,194.
9. 1,438,512 people have received one dose. 782,229 people have received two doses.
10. The percentage of Virginians receiving at least one dose has risen to 20.0%.

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The pandemic is far from over, but there is light at the end of the tunnel.

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QUOTE OF THE DAY

“The wolves in the woods have sharp teeth and long claws, but it’s the wolf inside who will tear you apart.”

Jennifer Donnelly