PEARLS & AMBER

CASSOWARIES

The article in Smithsonian started with a description of a Cassowary bearing down on the writer that had me gripping the sides of my seat.

Large, lumbering, angry, but, it turns out, merely intent on a mango that had fallen on the ground near him, the Cassowary looked like a giant, prehistoric turkey...which is to say, beyond ghastly.  I must remember to avoid Mission Beach, Australia.

But so, reading on, I find that these birds are on the endangered list.  Well, shouldn't they be?  Looking and acting like vicious prehistoric turkeys?  I've killed aphids for less than that.

But reading still further (I couldn't put the article down, I tell you), I found out that this is an odd breed to begin with.  This is a breed where the male birds rear the chicks.  It seems that the female lays the eggs, and then goes on her carefree way (for instance to hunt down mangoes that have fallen out of trees).  The male rushes in, builds a simple nest and incubates the eggs for about two months.  After the chicks are born, the male shows them what to do for up to a year.  Then, as it goes in the animal kingdom, at this very tender age, the chicks are tossed out on their ear to get on with life.

Cassowaries can live for forty to fifty years.  That feels like a really long time to survive as a flightless bird.

But see, I'm wondering if it's precisely because they are raised by males rather than Mommy that these birds have coped so poorly as to be on the endangered list.  Even though the cassowary is ranked as the world's most dangerous bird, this relative of the emu and ostrich is losing ground fast....

Daddy Dearest?  Tales of ineptitude? 

Or tales of wanting/needing Mommy's love from pre-hatching, but never getting it?  Mom never ever appearing, ever?  Do these poor. motherless birds even understand the concept of 'Mom'?  Maybe that's why the mother cassowary has her eggs and runs off.  She doesn't have a clue?

But then I check Wikipedia which informs me that emus are 'raised' by their fathers.  Hmmm. 

Ostrich are raised by both parents--so this must make for a really well-adjusted bird.

The article does mention that cassowaries live in a really hard part of the world to exist--

This all evokes such feelings of dismay, thank god I can't just rush over to Mission Beach, Australia and offer to help.

 

EARTH DAY

I could wax poetic.

Even though I wasn't a poetry major.

I could paint a painting--

Even though I am afraid of spilling the paint.

I could go sit outside and soak it all in-

But there is so much, too much.

So I'll just look through my recent photos, I took of my part of this beautiful world we live on in around above and underneath.

I'm happy today is Earth Day.

And of course I'm sure that everybody really knows that everyday is Earth Day.

Right?

SURFING IN IRELAND

I'm sitting here in Southern California feeling desperate for winter.  It hits, now and then, this feeling of loss.  Somewhere deep within there rumbles the need for snow, sleet, icy roads.  That haze of frost at dawn.  Praying desperately for the heat to kick in, in the car--

I'm not kidding. 

So that when I read an article about surfing in the frigid winter waters of northwest Ireland, I thought, hey, how about a little trip to Bundoran, Ireland.

"Bands of black clouds sailed ominously across the sky.  Rain bucketed down in freezing torrents.  Icy winds pummeled and churned the ocean."  Ohmigod.  Doesn't that sound beautiful? 

Wild weather.  Frigid, bleak, insane.  This winter gigantic waves came in, waves up to 45 feet tall.

Surfing in Ireland.  In the winter, the prime season for the huge waves.  I have to go before it's all ruined.  I used to want to ride the mail boat up the coast of Norway.   The boat was small and rough around the edges.  The real thing.  On the day my kids grew up I ran to book the mail boat--

It had turned into a huge cruise ship, behind my back.  It had turned into Club Med.

One surfer said blissfully that last year in Bundoran, it had been snowing in the mountains and hailing on the beach, when he was there.  He lives in Southern California--

"Now that the word is out," says this article in the New York Times, "Bundoran and nearby towns, with their unusual masochistic appeal and promise of huge, storm tossed swells, have become international surfing destinations."

Outside my door the sky is blue and the palm trees wave in the warm breeze.  I'd better book Bundoran right now.

GRAND CANYON GREEN WASH

Another magnificent natural wonder--

Another fight between those who wish to preserve it, and those who wish to preserve it, and also those who wish to preserve it.

Questions surrounding the Grand Canyon Green Wash:

Will flooding the Grand Canyon help protect it from further erosion?

Isn't the Grand Canyon itself the result of erosion?

Hasn't this been tried before, in the early 1990's, and the results 'hotly debated'?

It sounds superb on paper.  Green Wash.  I'm an American. Therefore I am all for any plan to save anything.  Particularly Mother Nature's creations.

So that reading about the plan to help our incredible Grand Canyon continue to be its awe inspiring self, I commenced to read about it enthusiastically.

And was immediately reminded that in America everyone gets their say, in however many words they want, so that the information, unintelligible to me the layman, knew no limits.

I think I gleaned that the plan serves little long term good in aiding the preservation of the Grand Canyon, because it needs to be done more often.  There was something about the endangered humpback chub fish that worried me.  And something about sand bars used by rafters, that didn't.

But in the end, I understood very little, and only in the vaguest sense possible.  Therefore I was unable to formulate an opinion worth more than a burnt piece of pie.

When I lived in Northern Florida, I fell ferociously in love with the endangered Everglades, and thought I might...you know, help.  I started by trying to read up on it.  Only to be met by a concrete barrier, miles high and incomprehensible, of conflicting and finger pointing information.

In the end, I will have to rely on those who know more than me. Those with degrees in engineering and cloud formation, and the loudest voices.