In Denver, and I’m homesick

(I'm confused.  I flew to Vegas, but I might be in Paris.)

For the past week, I have been in Denver, Colorado visiting our sons. Denver is large and growing rapidly, as is the entire Front Range of Colorado from north to south. Driving on the highways is reminiscent of driving in southern California. The area is full of young people who immigrated here from Ohio, Illinois, New York, and other places where life has ceased to be exciting enough. They come here for skiing, snowboarding, mountain biking, hiking, and camping in the Rocky Mountains nearby, and when in Denver there is plenty to do. The city boasts professional teams in baseball, basketball, football, and ice hockey, plenty of parks, bike and jogging paths, restaurants and bars of every stripe, interesting museums of art and history, and a good zoo. But I’m bored stiff. What the heck is my problem?

I’m bored because my primary activity in life, aside from blogging and trading stocks, is learning about, and living in, the woodland around my house. In short, I miss my forest in upstate New York and the “backyard ecology” that I practice there. Normally, an ecologist loves to travel to new places, because there are new habitats to explore, new birds to observe, new trees to appreciate. But in the city of Denver, that is not very satisfying. Oh, there are trees everywhere, but almost none of them should be here. Denver was built on the short-grass prairie of central Colorado—the native vegetation was only a few inches tall. Trees would have been limited to the banks of streams and rivers, and they would be cottonwoods and willows. The trees in the city now are mostly native to some other region of the U.S. or to another country: ash, Russian olive, Chinese elm, and Tree of Heaven, that native of China that I absolutely detest outside of its homeland. An irony is that we drove around a neighborhood yesterday with street names like Ash, Birch, and Cherry. Rub it in my face!

My issue here is that there is vegetation everywhere, but it does not constitute a “habitat”. Most homes have attractive green lawns, scattered trees planted in the yard and along the sides of the house, and a variety of flowering plants in gardens. All of this takes nearly daily watering, of course. But that is another complaint I have, for another blog. Nothing I criticize about Denver is any different than what I would say about almost any city in the world. We reconstruct a poor facsimile of the natural world that we took away when we built the city in the first place. For most, this is apparently just fine. In my case, I can’t wait until I go to the airport. But first, I have to spend time in Las Vegas, the Mecca of Facsimiles---Vegas even has the Eiffel Tower, which I always thought was in Paris.

The 60s, and other memories of the way it used to be

(They were radicals, but they were correct.)

Another year, another birthday.  What the heck?  I'm now 63 years old, but I don't feel a day over 62 1/2.  I attribute this amazing youthfulness to eating properly and exercise.  And, of course, a scotch and a cigar a day probably contribute as well.  I will go so far as to say that if you smoked one cigar a day and drank one scotch per day, you would also not feel a day over 62 1/2, even if you are 30 years old.  That combination of alcohol and nicotine has amazing restorative properties, and I am living proof of that.

Having lived this long, I have witnessed some interesting changes in practices and attitudes in many aspects of American life.  For example, I started school at age 5 in the first grade.  We lived in a somewhat rural area about a mile from the school.  To get to school, we walked.  But to do so, we walked along a country road, crossed a busy highway, and a set of railroad tracks.  Years later, the fathers of two of my friends were killed driving across those same tracks, so it was no joke.  After a couple of weeks of my mother walking with me, I was free to make the walk alone both to and from school.  There were some other kids making the same walk, but can you imagine parents letting any kid even twice that age do this today? 

I loved baseball when I was 9-12 years old, so I wanted to play on the local Little League team.  I tried out for 3 years and was cut from the team each year.  It was done like this.  The day finally came to announce who made the team.  The coach read the list and those of us who did not make the team, turned our backs and walked home while the coach started passing out the team shirts and caps to those who made it.  I distinctly remember the cheers of joy from those guys who had made the team, as they tried on their new gear.  I was devastated each time.  Our parents were not there.  We always faced these events on our own.  However, after the third turn down, one man started an additional team with those of us who did not make the Apaches team.  Our Sioux team then actually beat the Apaches during the regular season, which was one of the sweetest days of my life.  In those days, we always knew that success was not guaranteed, and that you had to prepare extremely well in a competitive world.

When I was in junior high school, I got paddled by the teacher in front of the class at least once each year for some infraction of some rule.  Usually this involved talking in class when we were not supposed to be doing that.  I was not alone.  Today, that kind of corporal punishment would be definite grounds for a law suit.

Then, there was the decade of the 60s, which was amazing in so many ways.  When we were first married, my wife worked full-time as a nurse and I was a student.  She could not get a credit card issued in her name in those days; it had to be issued in the husband's name.  Crazy, since she was making the money and I wasn't. Of course, now, we don't open the mailbox without there being an offer for her to accept a new card.

I mostly remember worrying about the military draft during the 60s.  It was all any male thought about.  Would I be called?  Could I escape it somehow?  If we stayed in university, we were safe until we graduated.  Maybe the Vietnam War would be over by then.  I remember a couple of guys when I was attending Ohio State whose grade point average (gpa) was right on the cusp of flunking out of school.  (In those days, universities actually flunked students out and they went home.  Seems much less common today.)  I distinctly remember these particular guys taking an exam in a course we had together.  If they got a D on the exam, their gpa would dip below the minimum needed and they would flunk out.  In the mid to late 1960s, that would almost certainly mean you would be drafted into the army within months, probably sent to Vietnam, and possibly killed or injured.  Talk about pressure when taking a math or biology final exam.

I was lucky.  I graduated Ohio State, got drafted, and ended up in Korea.  All in all, that was a valuable and interesting experience, and not dangerous.  In Korea, I was in military intelligence and lived undercover as a civilian, but I mostly spent my time playing ping pong, bridge, and third base on the softball team.  I had been sent to language school for a solid year before deploying to Korea, so I was nearly fluent in the language at that time.  My wife and young daughter joined me there, we lived with a Korean family in the village, and we learned a lot.  The army did not want my wife to come, but there was no law against a U.S. citizen going to Korea, and my wife would not take "no" for an answer.  This was pretty much SOP for my wife during our military years.

So times have changed for the better in some ways, and probably not for the better in other ways.  I often wonder, and even predict, if the last half of the 20th century may have been as good as it ever was in human history and perhaps as good as it will ever be, all things considered.  In time, I will build this argument and present it for your critical analysis.  But several centuries will have to pass before this idea can be tested fully, so you will have to let me know how it comes out.  Just send me a text message.

Cats: our feline friends, or are they?

(Cat eating a bird it has just killed.)

About a decade ago I had a student in my Conservation Biology class named Scott Boomer. We were discussing the problem of non-native organisms that week, and Scott told me he had kept some interesting records on the behavior of three cats that he and his wife had at that time. The cats (one male, two females, and all neutered) had access to food and water in Scott’s apartment around the clock. The three natural predators had the habit of capturing prey outside and bringing it back to Scott, often dropping it at his feet or putting it in their bathtub. Scott is a biologist and he was able to identify all the prey items returned to his apartment over a 2-year period.

The list included:

Mammals: 5 deer mice, 2 woodland jumping mice, 5 Eastern chipmunks, 4 meadow voles, 1 gray squirrel, 6 star-nosed moles, 4 short-tailed shrews, 1 cinereus shrew, 2 little brown bats, 1 Eastern cottontail

Amphibians: 2 green frogs

Reptiles: 1 Eastern painted turtle, 3 Eastern garter snakes

Birds: 3 common yellowthroats, 2 black-capped chickadees, 1 house wren

Total: 43 animals

Now, there are about 90 million cats in the U.S., according to the 2005-2006 National Pet Owners Survey. A certain percentage of those cats never go outside. But anyway you run the numbers, the collective mortality on native wildlife by U.S. cats must total millions of individuals of dozens of species. In some places in the world, feral cats, those that have gone completely wild, are responsible for the demise of rare species of birds. The Stephens Island wren (a flightless species) in New Zealand went extinct in the late 1800’s due to the island’s cats, or so that story goes. The wedge-tailed shearwater in Hawaii is also impacted by cats. Conservation biologists actively control cats (as well as non-native rats, mongoose, etc.) in such places today, especially on oceanic islands.

We hear a lot these days about our “ecological footprint”, or the impact that a human has on the earth’s natural resources and ecosystems. I doubt that our pet ownership is included in these calculations. Remember that I tend to think in terms of quantity and quality of habitat for biodiversity. I usually think of our “habitat footprint” as defined by the boundaries of our house and the lawn surrounding it. But the effect of that living space penetrates further depending on the chemicals we use on the property, how far away we or our children trounce on the environment, and the influence of our pets, of which cats are probably the worst offenders. There are zones of concentric circles beginning with the epicenter of the house itself, which include areas of decreasing influence on the fauna and flora that is there now, as one moves respectively outward. Cats probably have an effect in each of those zones, but they may represent the only threat in the outermost circle, which is perhaps several hundred meters from the edge of the house.

In fact, last year someone built a new house about 100 meters from the edge of my woodlot. For the past few months, I have had two cats roaming my property that I am sure live at that house. I have not had cats on my property in 20 years. And so it goes. We increase our collective ecological footprint, we chip away at the quantity and quality of wildlife habitat and, in my opinion, the quality of life is diminished just a little bit more---again.

In these few paragraphs I wanted to increase your awareness of an idea that perhaps you have not thought much about--- how that lovable pet cat of yours is possibly reducing the biological diversity in your neighborhood. I do not intend to explore a detailed solution to this problem, although attaching a simple bell to your outdoor cat would probably reduce its kill rate. You might be thinking that cats kill organisms that people do not like very much anyway, so what the heck. But I can assure you that every one of those species killed by Scott’s cats represents a unique and interesting biological story. Remember that not so long ago, nearly everyone thought it was fine to shoot, trap, or poison wolves, mountain lions, and eagles.

Senecence sucks: The sleep clinic (part 5)

(This woman in the Sleep Clinic is sleeping like a baby---a robot baby.)

Last week I had a sleepover at the hospital.  My wife made me report to my family doc at my annual physical that I suffered from sleep apnea, where you stop breathing for periods of time and then gasp for air.  Snoring is usually associated with this.  Apnea is, of course, disruptive to your normal sleep and can affect the body's ability to restore and repair itself.  I think my wife has the same affliction, so I sent an anonymous message to her family doc yesterday.  I squealed like a stuffed pig.

I packed my pajamas, a pillow, some reading material (see below), and a toothbrush and headed off in the direction of all those scrub gowns and the Sleep Clinic at 8:30pm.  All I knew was that I had to sleep there all night.  I didn't prepare anything.  After all, I have been sleeping my entire life.  How difficult could this be?  Just to make sure I could sleep, I went into my den and pulled Prosser's Comparative Animal Physiology off the shelf, a textbook I used 30 years ago.  A few minutes of reading about osmotic balance in the Chondrichthyes should do it.  If not, maybe there is a baseball game on tv.  Ten minutes max.  I'll be out.

But when Mike the technician appeared in my room, I realized there was a bit more to all of this than just a leisurely snooze.  He explained that he would be monitoring me during the night from his observation room, but that first he had to "wire me up".  He proceeded to clean up spot after spot on my body with alcohol, then smeared a glue-like gel in all those places, and then attached an electrical lead to each of those areas.  This is way more than I do each night at home before going to bed, and my wife used to be an ER nurse.  Maybe I kiss her good night, but nothing electrical.  When he finished, I had 24 leads attached to my head and a couple on my chest and lower legs, with all wires leading to a box on my night stand. Mike also attached devices in front of my nose and mouth to monitor my oxygen level and respiration.  Judas Priest!  I'm ready to begin filming Frankenstein now.  Sweet dreams.

But seriously, after I was wired, I was fearful about turning on the tv.  What if Mike wired me incorrectly and when I turned on the television I saw Desperate Housewives inside my head, for the rest of my life?  Was he an electrical engineer at Cornell?  He didn't look like one, and I've seen plenty.  The wires are supposed to transmit electrical signals from MY brain to HIS instruments in the observation room.  But what if the polarity got reversed and HIS machines sent impulses to MY brain?  I'm never going to get to sleep now, and I read all there is to know about osmotic balance in fish.

Fortunately, there was a baseball game on the tube.  By the third pitch, I was sending data to Mike's machines.  I slept more or less normally, for me. Tough to move or turn on your side when there is a half mile of wires running from your body. I would not do this during the summer when thunder storms are common. If lightning hit the hospital, I would probably look like Wiley Coyote after his own dynamite blew him up. (Which reminds me, how can a mammal not outsmart a bird? A coyote's brain is the size of an apple; a roadrunner's brain must be no larger than a few apple seeds. Come on Wiley. This is embarrassing.) 

When Mike greeted me in the morning, he was all too cheerful.  He removed the wires and other monitors, and gleefully reported that he got about 1,000 pages of data that now needed interpretation.  Amazing, in 30 years of doing scientific research, I never generated that much data.  How could I possibly accomplish all that in one night while asleep?  What a fool I have been all these years, staying awake, and working like a dog to gather a little data, sometimes only a datum.  Maybe our university students have had it right all this time.  Many of them must have generated copious amounts of data right in front of my eyes while I lectured.  I left the Sleep Clinic hurriedly, and bought the first legal stimulant I could find.