LA Weekly

I like birds that spin very fast and drop 20 feet or more. They are usually flown in a flock of around 20 birds (known as a kit). Ideally a kit should stay together and perform as a group. When several spin at the same time this is known as a turn, if they all spin together this is a full turn.

Before today, I didn't even know there was such a thing as a roller pigeon club. Or even a world-famous National Birmingham Roller Club. The world is just full of surprises: Mantatees, meerkats, and pigeons bred with a genetic propensity to rolling in mid-air.

Anway, if you see a trap like this:

you know you're probably near a roller-pigeon club.

Evidently, hobbyists who breed these genetically modified pigeons have been disturbed by the tendency among certain raptors to mistake their ingeniously defective pets for easy prey. The Roller Pigeon crowd's solution, according to charges filed today by the U.S. Attorney's office on behalf of U.S. Fish and Wildlife, was to trap and kill the raptors who came near their rolling birds.

But it looks like the jig is up. Today the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Law Enforcement Division arrested seven men on charges of trapping, beating and killing federally protected raptors. The men have been charged according to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

One of the men is the leader of a San Francisco club called the Bay City Rollers.

You can read about it on the Los Angeles Audubon's Web site. Or you can go to YouTube, and watch those freaky pigeons roll.

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From London, where she's on tour, my singer-songwriter friend Simone White sends an article about the bees, by Earth Action's Sharon Labchuk:

I'm on an organic beekeeping email list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with commercial operations is pesticides used in hives to fumigate for varroa mites and antibiotics are fed to the bees to prevent disease. Hives are hauled long distances by truck, often several times during the growing season, to provide pollination services to industrial agriculture crops, which further stresses the colonies and exposes them to agricultural pesticides and GMOs.

It originally ran on the Guerilla News Network's web site; it's also on Organic Consumers.

There's also a book by Ross Conrad that proposes a solution to CCD; it's called Natural Beekeeping: Organic Approaches to Modern Agriculture. And if you Google "organic bees" you come up with a slew of links on how organic bees are thriving.

But when I do a Nexis search for "ross w/2 conrad and organic and bees and colony" I come up with nothing. Replacing Conrad with Sharon Labchuk yields the same empty result. Even a broader search, eliminating the names, yields only a handful of articles, most from places such as Greenwire.

Why the big secret? Is it just too far-fetched a theory? Do we believe it?

 In Europe, they seem to be thinking about it more seriously. An article in Der Spiegel suggests that genetically modified crops may be killing bees; France has suspended the use of a sunflower-seed pesticide called "Gaucho" while it investigates its effect on bees  (and boy, Bayer -- the manufacturer -- is pissed). But here in the U.S. there's been little official action on the pesticide front vis-a-vis the bees, despite accumulating evidence that CCD has a chemical cause. Here, we're stuck on the mobile-phone meme -- a sure misdirect if there ever was one. (And if you talk to somebody like Bill Maher, he'd probably tell you that the pesticide companies planted that story. This time I might not think he's crazy.)

                 

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I woke up this morning fully expecting to hear that the town of Avalon had been consumed, but it wasn't. The wind has shifted; low clouds typical of spring have moved in. The Catalina Express live beach cam shot looks pretty good, but on the Casino Cam you can really see the smoke in the air (and the need for lights in some of the buildings).

Susannah Rosenblatt at the LA Times Breaking News Blog reports that there's even a restaurant open: Mr. Ming's Chinese.

Wildlife biologists are concerned about the remaining population of the Santa Catalina Island Fox, 90 percent of which was wiped out in a canine distemper epidemic nearly a decade ago. This would be the time of year when the dwarf fox's kits would just be venturing out into the world. No doubt there'll be some accounting later through the month; I hope it's not too grim.

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"Research on Catalina Research on found that the number of native plant species in an area increases the season after a burn," says the Catalina Island Conservancy's Web site.

That's good, I guess, but it's really hard to watch this one, just as summer moves in. It's even harder to watch flames press down on the town of Avalon than it was to watch a quarter of Griffith Park burn. The Catalina fire is already huge; only ground crews can fight the fire at night, and, well, it looks bad. For context, last year's lightning-sparked fire on the Island scorched 1,200 remote acres, and that seemed huge.

To be really selfish: This means two of my favorite camping and hiking spots in the world are on fire right now: Catalina Island, 27 miles off the Southern California mainland coast, and the Gunflint Trail, where the state of Minnesota meets the province of Ontario (one segment of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness; on the Canadian side, Quetico Provincial Park). Thirty-thousand acres have burned up there as of today. It's weird. I've seen ice on those lakes in early May. And, as we know, fire season in California doesn't begin in earnest until at least July, and even that's early.

It's going to be an interesting summer. I'm starting to wonder if Venice is going to blow, too. (Did I say anything about climate change? No. I didn't. It's just a really bad, widespread drought [see earlier post.])

If you, like me, like to follow fires around the country from the comfort of your home computer, or you, also like me, want to know where next to drag your ambulance-chasing, pyromaniac self to see what's happening, these links might help:

The Southern California Geographic Area Coordination Center has links to current incident reports, weather and "predictive services," such as this PDF document outlining what to expect this fire season (big surprise: "Earlier than normal start to fire season.").

The California Department of Forestry provides up-to-date information on major fires in the state. Click here.

InciWeb is a place where you can keep track of fires over the country; you can read the news releases, subscribe to RSS feeds or follow first-hand accounts from the front lines. It currently tracks only fires in U.S. Forest Service land, but it should expand nationally this year.

And this page, from the Association for Outdoor and Environmental Education, has more links about local fire than you can shake a burning stick at.

Also, some interesting insights here about the Island firefighting crew.

More to come in the morning.

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Just as I was firing up Word Press to blog about Daniel Pinchbeck's new Web site, Reality Sandwich, I detoured over to the site for more data and spent a whole hour there. And I didn't really have a whole hour to spare. If that's not a ringing endorsement, what is?

Starting with the banner at the top of the page -- a category list that looks like a yummy board game -- I clicked on "Eco," rummaged around for a minute among the Freegans (they squat, they dumpster dive, they hitchhike out of "the matrix"), learned from Bill Briscoe about how the lack of farm labor strains organic farming -- you can't pick ripe tomatoes with a machine (I did not know that), and then read David Rothenberg's beautiful, provocative and funny post about trying to convince a scientist to let him swim with the whales so he can hear their sounds. The scientist is prickly and protective; Rothenberg is insistent ("C'mon Mark! Making music with whales is not the same as running them over with a power boat!"), and, well, it's deep, and opens up a host of issues about interspecies communication, science and art.

Read the comment, too.

I'm hoping the site remains a portal for interdisciplinary ideas, where science meets art meets . . . oh, you know. I'm feeling the lack of that sort of thing these days in my compartmentalized little life.

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At Oregon State University, fire researchers have predicted one of the worst fire seasons ever for the Western states. Check out the graphic below (click for a bigger, clearer image).

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The city was shaken and stunned. Newspapers and authorities looked for villains. The Times speculated that "the blaze was caused by some Red, some half-unhinged firebug or some person with a fancied grievance against society." For several days after the fire, a 29-year-old unemployed studio technician named Robert D. Barr looked like he fit the Times' description perfectly.--The Griffith Park Fire, October 3, 1933

It's national news now that a fire is smoldering in Griffith Park, a 4,000-acre patch of open space at the eastern edge of L.A.'s Santa Monica Mountain range. The Hollywood Hills share the same patch of turf, as does the Hollywood sign; the Greek Theater, the newly renovated observatory and the Zoo are up there, too. None of these seem to be threatened, and my guess is that as the weather cools today, the now 600-acre fire will be contained.

Six-hundred acres, though, is a pretty big fire up here. That fire referenced above burned under 50 acres. But it was the deadliest in the city's history: Twenty-nine Depression-era work-crew firefighters died when the wind suddenly shifted.

Like that fire, this fire seems to have been caused by a human. Last night the story was that a homeless man had fallen asleep with a cigarette in his pocket; this morning there are reports that the fire had been set deliberately. (The man has been treated for burns and released -- he's no longer a suspect.) But the real culprit, I suspect, is the last three years of weather.

Frankly, I'm amazed that we've made it this long without a burn.

In the 12 years I spent living within a half mile of the park, I expected fires to start all the time. The hillside above the house where I last lived up there looked like a tinder box every autumn; the neighbors would go reasonably crazy if you didn't clear your brush.

But you can only hold back the fire cycle for so long: As the Sierra Club's magazine noted in a 1995 article: "Only You Can Postpone Forest Fires." There's plenty of human activity in Griffith Park. Cigarette butts litter the ground; kids play with firecrackers (I have climbed the hill to stop them); other people light prank fires. It's when those incidents follow one winter (2004-2005) of record rain, and then two more of obliterating drought, that we're in trouble. Two years ago the hills were wild with purple, yellow and green. This year -- in the spring -- so much had turned brown, it looked like August. It's not climate change or doomsday or pollution causing this, but simply Southern California's natural cycle of flood and fire.

I have to worry, though -- this isn't fire season. If it's like this in April and May, what's in store for October?

And how well did that new fire-protecting water system perform?

Larry Mantle on KPCC has an excellent show on the fire going on even as I write: He's interviewing one of my favorite fire experts, UC Riverside's Richard Minnich, and talking about habitat and drought. You can listen online following appropriate links, here.

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