• Securely fasten your garbage can lids.
• Don’t leave pet food outside at night.
• If you compost, bury any food scraps you toss into the pile.
• If you have fruit trees, pick up all of the fallen fruit.
• Eliminate potential den and nesting sights of small mammals by sealing up the crawl space underneath your house as well as any holes that might allow access to your attic. And regularly clean out your shed and other yard structures.
Remember, though, that wild animals are cunning and tenacious and have been known to rip away brand-new siding in order to reclaim a former den.
BIG CRITTERS
Keeping larger animals out of your yard may be difficult, but officials say it’s important to both your well-being and theirs.
Deer: Feeding them disrupts their diets—they need certain native plants to aid digestion. If they only get their food from people’s gardens, they run the risk of digestion problems that can lead to starvation. And as deer get more used to people, they create hazards on the roads and can become aggressive. In addition, a fed deer will view everybody’s yard as a potential cafeteria.
Coyotes and foxes: With more of these wild canines’ habitats disappearing, they’re showing up in places where they’ve never been seen before. Although they rarely, if ever, target humans, they’re very interested in your pets, which can be easy prey. That’s because to a typical cat, a full-grown coyote or fox can look like a relatively harmless dog. So keep your pets inside at night (when coyotes and foxes hunt).
Other large predators: Depending on your area, you may be prone to bear and mountain lion encounters, both of which are also on the rise. The same basic rules apply to keeping them out of your yard, but if one does venture in, you can scare it away by jumping around and yelling. The same goes if you meet one on a trail or in the parking lot of your local shopping mall. But this is only if they appear to be threatening you. In most cases, you can quietly walk away from a large predator and be left alone. And officials request that every sighting of a big animal be reported.
YOUR OWN NATURAL WILDERNESS AREA
Another option when dealing with urban wildlife (of the smaller variety)—give them a home away from home. For most of the species mentioned above, officials recommend against it, but it can be effective (and rewarding) for wild birds and some smaller mammals and reptiles. “The best thing you can do for wildlife, without question,” says Bob Sallinger of the Audubon Society, “is just naturescape your yard.” This primarily entails planting native vegetation, removing non-native plants, avoiding the use of pesticides, and keeping dogs and cats indoors. Some yards can even be designated wildlife habitats. This tactic comes with a lot of responsibility, though, so if you’re interested in naturescaping, research the bylaws of your municipality first.
And keep in mind that every action in nature has a reaction. So if you really want wild birds in your yard and decide to put up a feeder, you may get more than birds—you may get squirrels, chipmunks, or even rats feeding off the seeds that the birds drop on your lawn. It all comes down to plenty of research, a little experimentation, and a willingness to change course if you start attracting vermin (or the scorn of your neighbors).
OPPORTUNISTS
Three wild animal species have adapted so well to living with humans that about all we can do is step back and appreciate their abilities (and try not to feed them).
Common house mice: In terms of sheer numbers, these rodents have benefited more from humans than any other mammal has. Why? Because we give them two things that are in short supply in the natural world: food and protection. In the wild, mice live in burrows or under felled trees, which they must leave to forage for grains, making them vulnerable to snakes, birds, foxes, and other predators. Their only way to ensure survival: produce lots and lots of offspring. In your house, however, there are few, if any, predators lurking around (except your ferocious cat, of course). And there’s plenty of food in your cupboards and crumbs on your floor. So with the dangers removed, the food provided, and the reproduction rate steady, the common house mouse has become the world’s second most populous mammal. (We’re #1.)
Peregrine falcons: Once nearly wiped out in the U.S. because of the pesticide DDT, the world’s fastest bird of prey has rebounded, thanks in large part to urbanization. Before electricity, the peregrine was a daytime hunter. It has since adapted to take advantage of streetlights to hunt bats and other small creatures of the night. They’ve also adapted to living in a new environment: the big city. Skyscrapers resemble the peregrines’ native habitat—rocky cliffs—so today the birds can be sighted in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Chicago, New York, and other cities, where they are welcomed by the local residents. Why? They’re spectacular birds, and they eat pigeons.
Pigeons: It was an easy move for these birds to go from their rocky dwellings on cliffsides to the ledges of our buildings. Pigeons’ remarkable ability to nest almost anywhere (even inside air conditioners and vending machines), combined with their easily adaptable diets (cheeseburgers, candy, and edible trash), has helped the worldwide pigeon population explode to more than 350 million. Multiply that amount by 26 pounds of bird droppings per pigeon per year, and you have…a lot of reasons to try to reduce the number of pigeons. Cities around the world have been attempting this for decades—blasting pigeons with salt, firing giant nets over the top of flocks, scaring them with loud noises, poisoning them, placing food on electrically charged platforms, and even contraception—with little or no success.
And so, the battle goes on against the pigeons…and the mice, rats, gulls, roaches, raccoons, skunks, deer, bears, alligators, and so on. As we build more communities, more of their world will cease to exist, forcing them to survive in ours—with or without our help.
RANDOM BITS ON 2000s HITS
A few short, catchy facts about a few short, catchy pop songs.
• “Don’t Know Why,” by Norah Jones. Amazingly, this old-fashioned torch song was a Top-30 hit in an era dominated by hip-hop. The album, Come Away With Me, became the bestselling album in the history of the legendary Blue Note Records.
• “Lose Yourself,” by Eminem. From Eminem’s semiautobiographical movie 8 Mile, this was the first rap song to ever be nominated for the Oscar for Best Song. (It won the award.)
• “Hey Ya!” by Outkast. The repeated line “shake it like a Polaroid picture” became a catchphrase. But actually doing that damages the photo, leading Polaroid to issue a statement warning consumers to not shake their Polaroid pictures.
• “Hollaback Girl,” by Gwen Stefani. The song is built around a drumline stomp and chanted lyrics, like a cheerleading routine. Stefani got the idea when Courtney Love said in Seventeen: “Being famous is like being in high school. I’m not interested in being the cheerleader. I’m not interested in being Gwen Stefani.”
• “Bad Day,” by Daniel Powter. It became a #1 hit after it was used as the “exit music” for eliminated contestants on American Idol. It’s the only time a performer has had the Billboard Song of the Year (the top seller)…and never had another hit.
• “Gold Digger,” by Kanye West featuring Jamie Foxx. Foxx won an Oscar for his portrayal of Ray Charles in Ray. “Gold Digger” features a sample of Charles’s “I Got a Woman.” That’s really Charles singing, not Foxx, even though Foxx is credited on the song. Foxx’s sole contribution: a brief spoken intro.
• “Umbrella,” by Rihanna. The song was originally written for Britney Spears, whose management turned it down without her knowledge (which she came to regret). Mary J. Blige was the songwriter’s next choice, but they were unable to arrange a meeting, so it went to up-and-coming singer Rihanna.
BELTS
Buckle up with a few of our favorite geographical (and astronomical) belts.
BELTWAY: A section of highway that loops the perimeter of a major city. In politics, it refers to the Capital Beltway, which surrounds Washington, D.C.,
and is used to describe the difference between political perceptions inside and outside of Washington.
BIBLE BELT: Nickname given to the American South, roughly from Florida north to Virginia and west to Oklahoma and Texas, where fundamentalist Christianity and church attendance are important aspects of local culture. The term was first used by Chicago Daily Tribune columnist H. L. Mencken in 1924.
BORSCHT BELT: Nickname for a region of the Catskill Mountains northwest of New York City, a popular vacation spot for wealthy New York City Jews from the 1910s until the 1970s. It was in the Borscht Belt resorts that scores of world-famous comedians got their start, including Henny Youngman, Milton Berle, Rodney Dangerfield, Lenny Bruce, and Sid Caesar.
SUN BELT: Nickname given to the American South and Southwest, from Florida and the Carolinas to Southern California, a region that’s several degrees warmer year-round than the North. The term was coined by author Kevin Phillips in his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority. (According to Phillips, anyway.)
STROKE BELT: Nickname given to a region in the American Southeast, particularly Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas, that has an unusually high rate of death by stroke.
KU IPER BELT: A massive ring-shaped region of our solar system beyond the planets. It’s nearly two billion miles wide and contains numerous KBOs (Kuiper Belt Objects)—balls of ice, some more than 600 miles across, that orbit the sun.
BELT: A town in central Montana, population 633, named after nearby Belt Butte, a mountain that appears to have a belt of rocks around it.
GROANERS
Faithful BRI members keep sending Uncle John their horrible puns. Of course he loves them—and then insists on “sharing” them with us. So why are we inflicting them on you? Have you ever heard the saying “misery loves company?” Feel free to groan out loud.
A MAN HEARD ABOUT the discovery of gold in California. He immediately packed up his possessions and moved out west. Six months later, he gave up and returned home. Why? It didn’t pan out.
A GUY GOES INTO a hardware store and asks the manager for a tool to break up the hard ground. The manager shows him a wall of shovels, hoes, and other tools and says, “Take your pick.”
A RANCHER WAS taking inventory of his livestock. He figured that it wouldn’t take him too long because he knew for a fact that he had exactly 196 head of cattle. But then he discovered that he actually had 200 head? How’d he find out? He rounded them up.
“DOCTOR, DOCTOR, you’ve got to help me!”
“What’s the trouble?”
“One night I dream that I’m a car’s muffler. And then the next night, I dream that I’m part of the wheel.”
“Why is that such a big deal?”
“I wake up exhausted and tired.”
JOHN LOVES WHEAT—wheat bread, wheat rolls, wheat muffins—he can’t get enough wheat. Only problem: He’s allergic to it. Whenever he eats it, he breaks out in a rash. But does that stop him from eating it? No, he’s a real gluten for punishment.
THE STATE TREASURER had to balance the budget, so he sliced a little bit off the proposed funding for schools, parks, and other services. It was the most successful fund razor of the year.
TOM IS OBSESSED with monorails. All he ever talks about is monorails—especially how amazing it is that they travel with the use of just a single rail. He has a one-track mind.
RETURN TO CHERNOBYL
On page 404, we told the story of the Chernobyl disaster.
What’s happened in the years after the accident?
The answer may surprise you.
MELTDOWN!
More than two decades after the meltdown that made it famous, Chernobyl still stands for everything humans fear about nuclear power. On April 26, 1986, plant operators lost control of one of the reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the former Soviet Republic of Ukraine. The reactor core melted down, causing several explosions and a fire that released massive amounts of radiation directly into the environment.
Radioactive fallout from the disaster permanently displaced more than 300,000 people in the Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. It contaminated hundreds of thousands of acres of formerly valuable cropland and continues to threaten the region’s groundwater. The 1,100 square mile “exclusion zone” surrounding the ruined power plant will be uninhabitable for generations. Most frightening, scientists will likely never know how many lives were shortened by exposure to Chernobyl radiation.
SILENT SPRING
The immediate effects of the disaster were devastating to the local flora and fauna. Two square miles of pine forest adjacent to the power plant turned brown and died in a matter of days. Any farm animals unfortunate enough to be downwind within four miles of the reactor received lethal doses of radiation. But in a strange footnote to the disaster, by making a huge area of rural farm country unsafe for humans, the world’s worst nuclear disaster created the world largest accidental wildlife refuge.
Within the first few years, wildlife began to return. The pine forest grew back—although its trees now have a distinctly mutant look, with odd-sized needles and strange clusters of buds and branches. Birds and rodents actually nest in the walls of the giant concrete and steel sarcophagus that was built to contain the reactor core, and there are fish in the old cooling pond.
Moving out from ground zero, wildlife reclaimed not just the forests but abandoned towns as well—including the ghost-metropolis of Pripyat, from which nearly 50,000 people were evacuated two days after the accident. The evacuated zone is now home to wild boar, deer, beaver, fox, lynx, elk, and a large wolf population. Wild horses were reintroduced and are thriving along with rare birds like the black stork, marsh hawk, golden and white-tailed eagles, and the green crane.
OPPOSING VIEWS
The exclusion zone is no Garden of Eden, not by a long shot: Dr. Timothy Mousseau, of the University of South Carolina has studied wildlife inside the zone and has found higher mortality rates, lower birthrates, and an unusually high occurrence of genetic defects among Chernobyl’s bird populations. Mousseau claims that “reports of wildlife flourishing in the area are completely anecdotal,” and suggests that population pressure in less contaminated areas may be causing healthy animals to migrate into the exclusion zone—giving the appearance of a thriving ecosystem.
NOBODY WINS
In the meantime, aside from a small handful of elderly squatters who (illegally) moved back into their old villages despite the risks, and a skeleton crew of technicians who monitor the defunct power station, the animals have Chernobyl all to themselves.
MALE CHAUVINIST SMURF
On the ’80s cartoon The Smurfs, there was only one female character—Smurfette, who was actually created by the show’s villain, the evil wizard Gargamel, to infiltrate the Smurf community. Here are the ingredients that Gargamel used to make Smurfette: “sugar and spice (but nothing nice), a dram of crocodile tears, a peck of bird brain, the tip of an adder’s tongue, half a pack of lies (white, of course), the slyness of a cat, the vanity of a peacock, the chatter of a magpie, the guile of a vixen, the disposition of a shrew, and the hardest stone for her heart.”
THE BALLOON MAN
It’s hard to imagine birthday parties, celebrations, or political conventions
without a rainbow of balloons. So considering that they’re associated with
joyous occasions, it’s kind of ironic that if it weren’t for poverty and
sheer desperation, balloons never would have been invented.
FROM DEPRESSION TO INFLATION
Before the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression, Neil Tillotson thought he had a career that could last him a lifetime. In 1915 he dropped out of high school and began working for the Hood Rubber Company, a prosperous manufacturer of tires and rubber footwear located in Watertown, Massachusetts. In little time, he worked his way into a position as a researcher.
After serving in World War I (he was assigned to a cavalry unit that spent the war years chasing Mexican outlaw
Pancho Villa around Texas and northern Mexico), he returned home and reclaimed his position at Hood. With new products and research on artificial rubber, Hood’s wartime boom promised to continue into the post-war years. In the early 1920s, an industry newsletter reported that Hood had become the largest independent rubber footwear manufacturer in the country, capable of pumping out 75,000 pairs of shoes a day.
But then came the Depression. Struggling with cash flow issues and a lack of demand for its products, Hood Rubber went on hiatus for most of January 1931, locking its doors and laying off 1,200 employees. Along with everyone else, Tillotson found himself on an involuntary, unpaid vacation. To make matters worse, his brother and father-in-law had lost their jobs…and moved in with Tillotson. Trapped in a house that had become uncomfortably overcrowded, and with cabin fever setting in, he feared that Hood would not reopen. Regardless, he knew he couldn’t afford to work for a company that reserved the right to lay him off periodically with little warning.
Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader Page 57