Bayard

Bayard's Journal

August 26, 2020

Las Vegas Paiute Tribal Council's message to the US Senate and President Trump.

?

BY THE LAS VEGAS BAND OF PAIUTES TRIBAL COUNCIL

The Desert National Wildlife Refuge and the Sheep Mountain Range within it are known to us Paiutes as Nah’gah Kai. It is a landscape mountain range that holds special meaning for our people, a landscape that is central to our Nuwuvi history, stories, and beliefs, a landscape that has been under constant attack by the United States Air Force for decades. Cultural sites, bighorn sheep, and the endangered desert tortoise are among the many other precious resources central to our people’s ways and culture that are found within the refuge—and which long have been within the bombing practice area of air force pilots. Now, the air force is pushing to ramp up its destruction of our people’s history and culture by seeking to expand by 300,000 acres its bombing range within the Desert National Wildlife Refuge. It is critical that Congress ban the expansion of bombing that air force leaders are seeking to include in the National Defense Authorization Act, as the expansion would inflict permanent damage on this sacred site and violate our tribal sovereignty.

In 2018, the Moapa Band of Paiutes wrote and passed a resolution that opposed the expansion of the Nevada Test and Training Range into the refuge. The Las Vegas Paiute Tribe passed a similar resolution in 2019. These resolutions rejected the expansion of the bombing range, and the air force’s jurisdiction within the desert refuge. Both were both passed unanimously by the Tribal Councils and are the words and will of the Tribes. As sovereign nations, our Tribes must be acknowledged and respected.

Western expansion has historically reduced the ability of Southern Paiutes to use the expansive lands we consider our homeland. The creation of reservations further reduced the Tribes’ ability to use the land for travel and subsistence. So much has been taken from the Indigenous people of this land.

The United States government cannot justify the continued destruction, loss of history, and bombing of irreplaceable artifacts. The sacred sites within the refuge are central to our people’s traditions and identity. The Tribes have worked alongside cultural preservation experts, other Tribal communities, and conservationists to push back against the plans to expand military testing into the refuge. Tragically, these efforts to preserve our history and ancestral lands continue to be eclipsed by the agenda of the military-industrial complex.

The air force already controls nearly 3 million acres of land in Nevada—leaving our Tribal communities with limited access to our traditional resources and historical places. Currently, even without the air force having primary jurisdiction of the land, our Tribes have limited access to our ancestral lands and cultural sites. The air force has not upheld its promises to Native people nor acted in trust as stewards of our people, lands, and culture. That has been made abundantly clear by the severe damage of Pintwater Cave, which holds a special place in our religious beliefs and stories. Pintwater Cave held artifacts dating back thousands of years with an importance to our culture that can never be replaced. Bombing our sacred sites is the opposite of stewardship.

Also, the air force will only allow two trips a year to this site, with only 15 participants per trip to these places that are vital to our telling of history and identity. With more than 20 Tribes and a limited number of participants, the Southern Paiute people’s ability to pass down our culture, traditions, history, and knowledge is severely impaired.

https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/desert-refuge-sacred-don-t-bomb-it?utm_source=insider&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter

Things haven't changed much in a couple hundred years....

August 26, 2020

'Everything has changed': How hurricane preparations are adapting to a deadly pandemic

Thousands of hotel rooms, a million masks—safely escaping this season's hurricanes is forcing cities and states to meet an unprecedented challenge.

COVINGTON, LOUISIANA
People who live along the low-lying reaches of coastal Louisiana can be surprisingly sanguine about what hurricane season delivers come August. Lesser storms with names like Danny or Gustav sweep ashore and are soon forgotten. On Saturday, residents of New Orleans will observe the 15th anniversary of Katrina—the unforgettable, massive hurricane whose storm surge fed the collapse of the levees but still could not wipe their famously below-sea-level city off the map.

There’s no playbook, though, for fending off powerful hurricanes that hit in the midst of a pandemic—let alone one that arrives where the infection rate surged to one of the highest this summer. Officials guided by more than a century of hurricane preparedness have been forced to rewrite procedures this year to safeguard against spreading highly contagious COVID-19 along evacuation routes or in crowded shelters.

Although Hurricane Hanna rolled onto south Texas shores as a Category 1 storm last month, Louisiana this week was confronted with two major storms in the Gulf of Mexico at the same time. That’s a historic first, with the potential to deliver a one-two punch to southwest Louisiana.

Tropical Storm Laura, the greater threat, is forecast to grow into a Category 3 hurricane as it crosses the warm waters of the Gulf and is on course to make landfall in southwest Louisiana Wednesday night. Tropical Storm Marco, two days ahead of Laura, pelted rain before beginning to break up Monday—a bit of good luck for harried emergency planners, though Gov. John Bel Edwards also credits prayer.

As a back-up, he also has 2,000 National Guardsmen on standby, has positioned 94 high-water vehicles and 55 boats across the region, and has ordered up 218,000 ready-to-eat meals and 372,000 bottles of water.

(snip)

Scientists predict double disaster
Louisiana’s experience after Laura washes ashore may also serve as a primer across the Southeast hurricane zone in an unusually active season. Forecasters said the area could see from 13 to 19 named storms before the season ends Nov. 1, and as many as six major hurricanes.

Before Marco and Laura even registered as tropical disturbances in the Atlantic Ocean, scientists cautioned that major storms could lead to the spread of more COVID-19 infections.

New research by scientists from Columbia University and the Union of Concerned Scientists found that fierce storms ranked as Category 3 or higher could result in thousands of new COVID-19 infections. The scientists modeled an infection scenario by retracing the evacuation routes of the 2.3 million southeastern Floridians who fled Hurricane Irma in 2017. That same number of evacuees on the move today could prompt as many as 61,000 new cases of COVID-19, the study found. It is still undergoing peer review before publication in a scientific journal.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/08/how-hurricane-evacuations-shelters-change-with-coronavirus/?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=crm-email::src=ngp::cmp=editorial::add=Science_20200826&rid=2D7EBD8232363870D75E126868635ACF

August 26, 2020

How a 5-Ounce Bird Stores 10,000 Maps in Its Head

IT WEIGHS ONLY four or five ounces, its brain practically nothing, and yet, oh my God, what this little bird can do. It’s astonishing.

Around now, as we begin December, the Clark’s nutcracker has, conservatively, 5,000 (and up to 20,000) treasure maps in its head. They’re accurate, detailed, and instantly retrievable.

It’s been burying seeds since August. It’s hidden so many (one study says almost 100,000 seeds) in the forest, meadows, and tree nooks that it can now fly up, look down, and see little x’s marking those spots—here, here, not there, but here—and do this for maybe a couple of miles around. It will remember these x’s for the next nine months.

How does it do it?

32 Seeds a Minute

It starts in high summer, when whitebark pine trees produce seeds in their cones—ripe for plucking. Nutcrackers dash from tree to tree, inspect, and, with their sharp beaks, tear into the cones, pulling seeds out one by one. They work fast. One study clocked a nutcracker harvesting “32 seeds per minute.”

These seeds are not for eating. They’re for hiding. Like a squirrel or chipmunk, the nutcracker clumps them into pouches located, in the bird’s case, under the tongue. It’s very expandable …

The pouch “can hold an average of 92.7 plus or minus 8.9 seeds,” wrote Stephen Vander Wall and Russell Balda. Biologist Diana Tomback thinks it’s less, but one time she saw a (bigger than usual) nutcracker haul 150 seeds in its mouth. “He was a champ,” she told me.

Next, they land. Sometimes they peck little holes in the topsoil or under the leaf litter. Sometimes they leave seeds in nooks high up on trees. Most deposits have two or three seeds, so that by the time November comes around, a single bird has created 5,000 to 20,000 hiding places. They don’t stop until it gets too cold. “They are cache-aholics,” says Tomback.

When December comes—like right around now—the trees go bare and it’s time to switch from hide to seek mode. Nobody knows exactly how the birds manage this, but the best guess is that when a nutcracker digs its hole, it will notice two or three permanent objects at the site: an irregular rock, a bush, a tree stump. The objects, or markers, will be at different angles from the hiding place.

Next, they measure. This seed cache, they note, “is a certain distance from object one, a certain distance from object two, a certain distance from object three,” says Tomback. “What they’re doing is triangulating. They’re kind of taking a photograph with their minds to find these objects” using reference points.

Psychologist Alan Kamil has a different view. He thinks the birds note the landmarks and remember not so much the distances, but the angles—where one object is in relation to the others. (“The tree stump’s 80 degrees south of the rock.”) These nutcrackers are doing geometry more than measuring.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2015/12/03/how-a-5-ounce-bird-stores-10000-maps-in-its-head/?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=crm-email::src=ngp::cmp=editorial::add=SpecialEdition_Escape_20200820&rid=2D7EBD8232363870D75E126868635ACF

Really quite fascinating.

August 25, 2020

Dogs Meet Their Owners After A Long Time

Undiluted and honest joy!

August 25, 2020

Woman Accidentally Dyes Cat Yellow

A cat owner who applied a treatment to her beloved pet to get rid of a fungal infection accidentally ended up dying the poor moggy completely yellow.

As anyone who has ever cooked or eaten a decent curry knows, turmeric can be a difficult stain to shift.

However, it also has some pretty decent properties, including - apparently - being a treatment for fungal infections in cats.

So, with that in mind, Thammapa Supamas, a cat owner from Thailand, liberally applied some of the magical plant extract to her cat when it developed an infection.

(snip)

It is also responsible for the yellow stains that you get on your hands and clothing if you're not careful when cooking or eating anything that contains it.

Anyway, her overly thorough application of the treatment means that her cat is going to be yellow for a bit just yet.

Luckily, this story has a happy ending.

The treatment seems to have worked pretty well, and the feline's poorly paws are starting to improve.

https://www.ladbible.com/community/animals-woman-accidentally-dyes-cat-yellow-after-applying-turmeric-treatment-20200824

August 25, 2020

Microplastics have moved into virtually every crevice on Earth

A collection of new research provides more clues about where and how microplastics are spreading.

The Maldives archipelago in the Indian Ocean includes 1,192 islands. In 1992, the government added one more—an artificial construct that serves as a landfill, where 500 tons of trash are dumped every day.

Two truisms of island-living everywhere are especially true in the Maldives: Most consumer goods must be shipped in, and most waste is produced by tourists. In the Maldives, a developing nation that lacks much local manufacturing, a single tourist produces almost twice as much trash per day as a resident of the capital city of Malé, and five times as much as residents of the other 200 populated islands, according to government statistics. Consequently, the tiny island nation was ranked last year as the world’s fourth largest producer per capita of mismanaged waste.

Now marine scientists at Flinders University, near Adelaide, Australia, have added another, predictable statistic to the Maldives’ trash horror story: The island chain, renowned for its rich marine biodiversity, is also home to the world’s highest levels of microplastics on its beaches and in the waters near shore.

(snip)

Primary microplastics, such as microbeads used in personal care products or the pellets used in plastics manufacturing, are intentionally manufactured small. Secondary microplastics are the consequence of one of plastic’s most valued assets: its durability. They begin as discarded products that are broken down in the oceans by sunlight and wave action. Over time, the fragments become smaller and smaller. They will presumably survive for centuries.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/08/microplastics-in-virtually-every-crevice-on-earth/?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=social::src=linkedin::cmp=editorial::add=li20200819science-newsciencemicroplastics::rid=&sf236878413=1

We just keep poisoning ourselves. The Earth is just about tired of warning us.