Friday, September 21, 2018

So much truth in the following profound, yet simple statement by Connecticut ecology and evolutionary biology professor David Wagner--"Ornamental, non-native and exotic plants rarely support the local food chain like native plants do"..........."Native insects, native plants, native birds and animals evolved together over time, developing intimate associations and adaptations for one another"............."Planting exotic species limits the potential of yards and parks to support wildlife"............ "And non-native plants become doubly problematic if they are invasive"............. Many forests, prairies, and chaparral natural communities across North America are becoming dense thickets of Oriental bittersweet, multiflora rose, Japanese barberry, winged burning bush, bamboo, tumbleweed, sahara mustard, devils thorn and quickgrass---plants that are able to thrive in part because many native animals cannot or will not eat them"...........In my 19 and 16 years respectively gardening in my current Southern California and former northern new Jersey homes, I turned about half of my once monolithic non-native lawn areas into "a smorgasbord of native plants that support a healthy mix of insects, songbirds and other animals all the way up the food chain"............ "To make a songbird, you have to have caterpillars – to raise a clutch of nestlings, a mother bird will need hundreds"............"Plant exotic ornamentals that don't attract local insects and you might as well hang a sign that reads, Songbirds not welcome"...........I encourage you to join me in reversing our downward spiraling biodiversity loss by creating your own native plant backyard habitat--Fun it is to see the immediate return of birds, butterflys and the rest of the critters that once called your neighborhood home

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https://phys.org/news/2018-03-insectageddon-garden-native.html#nRlv How to fight Insectageddon with a garden of native plants ...
Thursday, September 20, 2018

As any of you who have followed this blog know so well, "a litany of scientific studies demonstrates that lethal methods are ineffective at controlling coyotes because they disrupt the animals’ social ecology and ultimately fail to reduce predation losses"..............."A breeding pair of coyotes will stake out and defend a territory"........... "If unmolested, a breeding pair will have pups and form a pack(family unit) of some 4-6, ranging up to 10-12 individuals".............."Each pack has a dominant breeding pair"............."Other adults are behaviorally sterile and do not breed"........... "This has implications for coyote control because in areas with heavy coyote mortality, these typically sterile females are released and can breed".............In addition, the elimination of the initial breeding pair creates a territory vacuum, enabling transient Coyotes to come in and potentially divide up what was once one Coyote's family territory into two or more family territories, exponentially expanding Coyote numbers via the breeding of multiple females........."In addition to these behavioral controls on breeding, in unexploited coyote populations that are near the saturation point in terms of food availability, many pups die of starvation and never reach maturity"..........."In exploited populations, a greater number of pups will survive into adulthood"................"A further limit on coyote livestock predation is due to learned behavior".................."Coyotes, like most predators, are reluctant to sample new food".............. "If they are not preying upon livestock, they are unlikely to begin".............."However, in exploited populations, young orphaned coyotes must fend for themselves and in desperation will prey upon livestock and become livestock killers"................"To be successful at reducing coyote populations, a minimum of 70 percent of the population must be killed on a sustained basis, virtually impoosible to achieve"................"In the end, the only alternative that is effective is nonlethal measures such as guard animals, corralling livestock at night and herding"

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https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/09/20/coyote-killing-is-counter-productive/ SEPTEMBER 20, 2018 Coyote Killing is  Counter ...
Wednesday, September 19, 2018

While certainly reaching their most southern territorial limits due to lack of moisture-rich grasslands, both archaelogical and historical records do in fact indicate that populations of Bison did occupy the Mexican regions of Sonnora and Chichuahua immediately adjacent to Arizona and New Mexico as well as the touch more southerly regions of Durango, Coachula, Zacatecas and Nuevo Leon..............Records seem to indicate that by 1850, the last of the wild herds had been extirpated by a combination of warming weather and hunting by both Native Tribes, Spaniards and the admix of these people(Mexicans)......................."A detailed report from Sonora, by Ignaz Pfefferkon, who lived for 11 years in Sonora as a missionary (∼1756–1767) wrote, 'In northeastern Sonora, in the uninhabited regions which border with the mountains of the Apache], there is a kind of wild cattle, called forest oxen by some, but known generally in Sonora and in the New Spain as cibulos or ciboros [c´ıbolos]"................ "These animals have a fine, thick, curly hair rather like sheep’s wool but reddish-brown in color (Treutlein 1949)"

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https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7809/1108b65d0416fc6cf16bf99515a5723b19e4.pdf Historic Distribution and Challenges to Bison Recovery in t...