Jim Robertson, an outstanding wildlife photographer, “shoots” all of his subjects in their environment, living their lives without interference. Could this photo be a wildlife Mona Lisa, whose expression sparks debate for centuries? We’ll never know.
Wildlife Watch has a new section of the Binocular for engaging photographs of wild animals. All submissions must be ethically obtained, without baiting or other lures. To participate, please email wildwatch@verizon.net
BY KAREN SCHUMAKER
REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION KAREN SCHUMAKER
The enemies of the wild creatures are all around us and the war on wildlife is unrelenting. I begin this newsletter far away from Newhaven and observing the creatures of another forest under siege. A raccoon dare not show his face here on the land where humans have supplanted his home range with a chicken house—lest he be accused of egg stealing. The noble skunk who catches many “harmful” garden insects is likewise blasphemed with cruel and arbitrary slanders. The always-wild mountain lion is persecuted wherever his tracks in the snow are noticed by a human, and the local newspaper happily refers to his murder as an “elimination of a “threat”. Everywhere and always Brother Bear is baited and tormented and mocked and irrationally feared as a madman. Should he growl or roar (a sound normal and natural to his vocal cords and body build), his “hello” is anthropomorphized as “anger” or “rage” by trigger-happy humans. And because his magnificent strength occurs in the absence of opposable thumbs or delicate “table manners,” he is accused of coarseness and violence. Yet I have seen Brother Bear place his great paws on my fiberglass window screen and not tear or dent it—leaving only a smudge of dirty ant juice. And I have scolded him for raiding a cooler, only to find it is I who am ashamed for being rude, when he recoiled from it with great embarrassment (from not realizing it was mine) and he never again offended me with his pretty tooth holes in the white vinyl lid. I have felt his messages, in my flesh and in my heart, when he wasted his precious time to come back again to me just to communicate—to tell me nothing was required of me except that I be as real to him as he, by his nature, is always to me.
A bear needs 30,000 calories a day to fatten up to get through the winter. Don’t ever give him junk food. He may be too hungry to say no to junk that’s not good for him. Given a choice, I have seen Brother Bear pass over store-bought “delicious” apples to eat the half-wild apples I gathered from some untended garden—just as I’ve seen Mama, our cooler hole mouse, pass up store-bought bread, but completely devour a bit of melon or a carrot.
In the wild there is no time for mistakes. There’s not a second to spare for sinning. If you don’t get it right the first time, you perish. Brother Bear came to me and told me that he who doesn’t live in the moment is dying in the moment. We are not required to heap apologies on nature – only to cease and desist in this (and every subsequent) moment, from offending.
A wild bear accomplishes more in a few minutes than most humans I know (myself included) do in a day.
The deer, also, do not make false steps. Economy of energy is the Rule of the Artery to their flesh. A calm, centered spirit moves their blood from one cell to another. In their feeding and in their travels, nothing is ever wasted.
The wild creatures do not hurry—unless they are being harassed or pursued. They know that to hurry costs more energy than can be efficiently replaced.
The wild creatures don’t have problems like trying to quit coffee. They really don’t have problems at all except for the harassment and persecution from humans. Normal physical difficulties they meet with an assured wisdom and grace. The day when I can fly as high as the pine siskin—or run as fast as a chipmunk—or keep myself warm all winter in a burrow in the earth like the bear does without even blankets or a stove—then I will think that I have something to brag about. Until then I look about me and I see that these creatures have it all over us humans. We are so pathetic in our talents compared to the marvelous things they do daily.
In love and faith, for the animals,
Karen
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Karen Schumaker is editor of the Newhaven News, a publication of the Newhaven Private Wildlife Sanctuary. Newhaven is dedicated to the protection and preservation of non-human indigenous species. Karen can be contacted by mail at: POB 217, Deary, ID 83823.
In February, Taffy Williams, who heads NY4whales, raised red flags about the proposal of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), that operates within the Department of Interior, regarding the proposed offshore wind farm in the NY Bight.
This proposal is still in progress:
https://www.boem.gov/Outer-Continental-Shelf-Wind-Energy-Leasing-in-the-New-York-Bight/
NY4whales wrote the following (in summary:)
Our concerns:
300 turbines will involve pile driving with some of the loudest sounds on earth – far exceeding that which can kill humans, impair and likely kill whales, dolphins, etc., or certainly drive them onto the beaches. The area of the construction site is 126 sq. miles.
The site of the wind farm is 11 miles south of Long Beach, LI, in the NY Bight, which has been known as the “Ocean Dumping Capital of the World” (mostly illegal) for some 200 years, receiving the refuse and industrial, chemical, raw sewage, sludge (you name it) waste of our region. Pile drivings will penetrate at least 100’ through the sediment, and likely much more since these are some of the largest wind turbines ever built – 600’ tall, with 180’ blades.
A few years ago, during the battle to stop construction of the Port Ambrose Liquified Natural Gas terminal, sediment samples in the NY Bight were taken. Scientists found carcinogenic, mutagenic, toxic PAH’s, PCB’s, heavy metals, acid waste, raw sewage, and a toxic conglomerate just waiting to be released. Construction of the wind farm will release massive amounts of contaminated sediments; these upchurned toxins will migrate throughout the NY Bight and beyond, including to the Hudson River.
What marine life is not killed by the construction of the wind farm, the sediment contamination will.
This wind farm area will create a wall of giant 180’ rotating blades that birds will have to pass over or through. Why do we have to try to fix our global warming disaster by destroying so much – when solar panels on every rooftop would eliminate the need for any wind farm!
Bladeless turbines are now available – these won’t kill birds or bats, and won’t create harmful low frequency noise on land or in the water.
There are even more detrimental problems with this massive wind farm in the NY Bight, and if you have an opportunity, just say “NO!”. Let’s not jump on the “wind power will save us” bandwagon when we don’t use the best, least “lethal” wind. What we have left on earth is a quickly vanishing treasure. We must urgently protect every life form that is left on this earth – every bird, whale, sea turtle and fish is precious now.
NY4whales supports wind energy, but only if it “does no harm” to whales, birds, marine life, or humans. (This means bladeless turbines, on land only. We believe the NY Bight is perhaps the worse site on the planet to build a wind farm.
Wildlife Watch encourages you to contact NY4Whales to learn more about the proposal:
Taffy Williams,
NY4Whales/NY4Wildlife,
Yonkers, NY 10707 USA,
www.ny4whales.org
Taffy Williams is a member of the Board of Directors of the Cetacean Society International, and a NYS licensed wildlife rehabilitator.
By Cynthia Hacker
July nights are an exciting time to view the theatrics of summertime fireflies. They put on a spectacular light show even in your own backyard. But if you really want to be dazzled, head out to a meadow, where they do their best work. The most amazing venue in my neck of the woods is the Nyquist-Harcourt Wildlife Sanctuary in New Paltz, NY. Nestled off the side of the historic Huguenot Street and hugged by the Shawangunk mountains is the 56-acre preserve, created to be a “forever wild setting” where grasses and herbaceous plants host a wide variety of animals, including a reported 140 bird species.
To see the fireflies, get to the sanctuary between 9:30 and 10 pm on a summer night. As you head down the entrance path, you will pass through a pine forest of blinking, glowing wonder. It’s Christmas time again and someone has decorated the trees with a thousand brilliant lights! Moving down the lane, you will reach a small wooden bridge over a vast marshy pond. At this hour, it’s luminescent with the strange green glow of algae. The flies have also lit up this place, in what again looks like the planned succession of moving Christmas lights, and if you listen closely, the bullfrogs are voicing their pleasure with a hearty “Gup! Gup!”
If you’re not afraid of the dark, venture into the labyrinth of trails after the bridge. They are dark and wooded, and a definite favorite of the flies. It is spooky and magical at the same time, their bright little signals could almost be the lanterns of fairies, who knows? It’s a veritable wonderland.
Trying to photograph fireflies takes a great deal of knowledge. Cell phone cameras don’t seem adequate. If you light up the area with a flash, you don’t see the lights you are trying to capture. If you take a photo without a flash, you don’t capture the lights.
Here’s one solution that we found online:
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Cynthia Hacker lives in New Paltz, NY. She spends her free time exploring the many wild places that grace the area. She is a writer and lover of nature.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) used the headline “Vegan is the New Kosher,” when it reported that Rabbi David Rosen joined 70 rabbis worldwide urging Jews to become vegan. Rabbi Rosen is the International Director of Interreligious Affairs at the American Jewish Committee in Jerusalem. He’s also the Honorary president of the International Jewish Vegetarian Society.
He said in part, “…people should no longer collaborate or be party to an industry which is problematic ethically, environmentally, or in terms of economic justice.
He’s not saying to go “cold turkey,” but to make more plant-based choices when you can.
Israel is credited with having the largest number of vegans in the world per capita including both Jews and Muslims.
Since the meat industry is a major contributor to CO2 emissions, deforestation, and water consumption, Silicon Valley tech companies are funding research to develop meat analogs. According to the BBC report, funding is coming from Bill Gates and Richard Branson, as well as traditional meat suppliers like Cargill and Tyson Foods. They no doubt see the writing on the wall!
I can tell you that my husband, dogs, and I love analogs that are primarily from the Gardein brand. My cats unfortunately don’t go for it yet!
The chief executive of Impossible Foods, the company producing the bleeding meat, is Pat Brown. His goal is to replace animals completely by 2035! He said that the meat industry is more destructive than that of fossil fuels, mining, transportation, and logging.
This BBC article backs that up https://www.bbc.com/news/business-43802572. They say livestock production is responsible for 18% of total greenhouse gasses, and animal protein requires 11 times the amount of fossil fuel to produce compared to plant protein, according to the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International.
Mr. Brown works with biochemists to mass-produce heme – a plant-based protein that resembles blood. He said it’s the “secret sauce” that gives the burger its advantage.
Other meat analog companies have jumped in with different technologies and are being supported by Silicon Valley companies. Two are Memphis Meats and Just Inc. According to the BBC report, their labs are sophisticated and show that the scale of veggie meat production matches the biggest slaughterhouse in the US, but instead of cows it has 50,000-gallon bioreactors.
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Visit:
In March of this year, the Norwegian University of Life Sciences published this incredible report:
HUMAN HUNTING HAS CHANGED THE CHARACTERISTICS OF MOTHER BEARS’ BEHAVIOR TO THEIR CUBS.
The professor who headed the research, Jon Swenson, said that a single female in Sweden is four times more likely to be shot than one with a cub. “In the period from 2005 to 2015, the number of females keeping their cubs an additional year increased from 7% to 36%. More cubs stay with their mothers an additional year (up from 1.5 years to 2.5 years).
He insightfully adds that “Man is now an evolutionary force in the lives of the bears.” Females who keep their cubs longer live safer lives, but they reproduce less often. This reduces their total number of offspring throughout their lives.
We at Wildlife Watch believe this is an intelligent decision on the part of the bears to outsmart the hunters, and not merely an incognizant or unconscious reaction to hunting.
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Wildlife Watch is grateful to Jim Robertson, a rare ethical photographer of wildlife, for allowing us the use of his photos that are taken without lures and artificial props, and without causing the wild animals any disturbance that would alter their behavior. You can see more photos on his website:
It’s the stated objective of the Bureau of Wildlife (BOW), that operates within the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), to increase “game” species for hunters and trappers. Sometimes the unknowing public, even children, can be recruited to help in their efforts, without knowing the real purpose
BOW benefits by being called “DEC” for they are given a false image of having environmental concerns, when in fact their primary concern is to get firearms revenue from hunting and to sell hunting permits.
Marilyn Leybra spotted the following announcement by the DEC: “Wildlife biologists are seeking the public’s help to learn about new black bear dens in NY. The bears may be fitted with radio collars to help track their activities throughout the year and locate dens.
… A bear den may be in a rock crevice, tree cavity, or under heavy bush or fallen trees. Females give birth in January or early February and if you are near a den you may hear the cubs’ high-pitched squeals.” Marilyn, who has been a wildlife rehabilitator for over 30 years, and whose large animal rescues belong in Ripley’s Believe It or Not, was extremely sensitive to this little cub’s feelings about it all.
She wrote: Did u see latest DEC Weekly Bulletin, in case you ever wondered what an infant bear cub’s eyes look like when being damagingly exposed to daylight, while having a nightmare about being ripped from den & mom’s belly & being man-handled? Wildlife management ‘biologists’ at work monitoring ‘cub production,’ for ‘harvesting’ & asking for our help to locate dens. Sure.
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Marilyn Leybra can be contacted through Wildwatch@verizon.net
Wildlife Watch has written about Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, before. She came to office in October 2017 in a big celebration with her cat. Apparently she is sticking to her campaign pledges of protecting the environment. According to The Guardian, “…her coalition government made tackling climate change one of the cornerstones of its policies, committing to transition to 100% of electricity generation from renewable sources by 2035 and making the economy carbon neutral by 2050.
Greenpeace New Zealand said the government’s announcement was a ‘historic moment’ for the country and ‘a huge win for our climate and people power’”.
The PM said: “We have been a world leader on critical issues to humanity by being nuclear free…and now we could be world leading in becoming carbon neutral.”
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our president would follow her lead?
This year, a bill was introduced to amend the education law in relation to requiring public schools to offer plant-based food options. The bill was initiated by the League of Humane Voters® (LOHV®) and introduced by Assembly Member Richard Gottfried.
It reads as follows:
The People of the State of New York, represented in Senate and Assembly, do enact as follows:
Section 1. The education law is amended by adding a new section 915-a to read as follows:
3 § 915-a. Plant-based food options. 1. Upon request by a student or
4 person in parental relation to the student, every public school shall
5 offer the student a plant-based food option as an alternative to every
6 meal or snack offered in food service to the student. The plant-based
7 food option shall be offered at no additional cost to the student beyond
8 what would be charged for a comparable non-plant-based food option.
9 2. The school shall respond in a reasonable manner and time to any
10 request made under this section, consistent with guidance by school
11 authorities. The request shall be effective for every school meal or
12 snack in which the student is reasonably expected to participate. This
13 section does not preclude the offering of plant-based food options to
14 students who have not requested it, and does not preclude an individual
15 who has requested a plant-based food option from selecting a non-plant-
16 based food option.
17 3. As used in this section:
18 (a) “Plant-based food option” means food or beverages that are free of
19 animal products and, as relates to the “protein” portion of a meal,
20 recognized by the United States Department of Agriculture as a meat
21 alternate for purposes of the national school lunch program.
22 (b) “Animal product” means meat, poultry, seafood, dairy, eggs, honey,
23 and any derivative thereof.
24 4. In implementing this section, the school and school authorities
25 shall consult with the school district nutrition advisory committee
26 under section nine hundred eighteen of this article, where applicable.
27 § 2. This act shall take effect immediately and shall apply to public
28 school food service beginning with the school year, as defined in the
29 education law, beginning one year after it shall have become a law.
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Please contact Jeffery Termini, Legislative Director of LOHV® to see how you can help this bill to pass.
We totally get that it’s not the geese, it’s the poop, but we at Wildlife Watch promote only non-lethal methods of goose dissuasion and are more than happy to let our readers know about anything that helps our mission to humanely resolve human-wildlife conflicts.
On the site of the Goosinator, you will see this little machine work on grass, sand, water, snow, even ice.
They say it’s “affordable,” and they appear to have a lot of happy customers. I would check it out at https://www.goosinator.com
In a report put out by Citizens for Alternatives to Animal Research and Experimentation (CAARE), researchers at Johns Hopkins University show that computers can predict the safety of chemicals better than animal testing, and at a much lower cost. The software program is called REACHAcross™ and it uses big data and Artificial Intelligence to analyze tens of thousands of chemicals to evaluate how they might react in the human body.
To see the full report and many others, please contact: Barbara Stagno, President CAARE, at
barbara@caareusa.org
and visit: https://www.caareusa.org
BY JIM ROBERTSON, AN ETHICAL PHOTOGRAPHER
This grizzly bear (aka Alaska brown bear) whose image I “captured” here was never confined, prodded or restricted in any way for this “shot.” She was in fact going about her business as though I weren’t even there, cashing in on a bountiful salmon run following the incoming tide off the Shelikof Strait. Although it looks like she’s staring into the camera, she’s actually focusing on a fish struggling upstream beyond where I was crouched nearby.
To a hunter, the temptation to blast away and take home the trophy head or hide would have been overwhelming. But as a wildlife photographer, I got all I could hope for from the encounter, including the satisfaction that the bear would live out her life free of human greed and exploitation while passing her genes, knowledge and know-how on to future free-living ursines.
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To see more amazing photography by Jim Robertson, please visit: http://www.animalsinthewild.org
