Chemtrails in Simcoe County

 

I recently joined a local field naturalist club (not field naturist, these people their clothes on).  I might be the youngest person in the group but everyone seems very knowledgeable, gentle and eager to be involved.  The last two points came to the fore last night when a woman began circulating a petition demanding that the Canadian government stop secretly releasing unknown contaminants via chemtrails and to tell us what is in these chemtrails and the group’s president politely let the signing go on (without once offering support for the position).

 

Briefly, chemtrails are visible evidence of chemicals being released in high atmosphere from jet aircraft.  These are in addition to (probably) harmless contrails that jets make under the right conditions.

 

I thought it was a crazy conspiracy theory until I woke up this morning and looked out the window! Now, …

I still think it is a crazy conspiracy theory. Well, there is a broad umbrella of chemtrail conspiracy theories: The chemicals are designed to reflect sunlight back to space to cool the Earth, the chemicals are used to control human behavior, or, my favorite, are used, in connection with electro-magnetic waves, to power and focus high-energy particle weapons.

Each idea is crazy and groundless, as Mythbusters, How Stuff Works, Al Gore and Wikipedia all try to explain.

I found an online version of a petition that looks similar to the one I was offered last night.

WE, the undersigned residents of Canada draw the attention of the House to the following:

THAT high altitude aerial spraying has been observed occurring over Canada; from British Columbia to Newfoundland; for at least the last two years;

THAT this aerial spraying has been carried out by large military type jet aircraft that create white plumes which evidence suggests are chemical-laden (hereinafter “chemtrails”) and often seen in the form of large “X’s”, “O’s” and checkerboard patterns;

THAT this aerial spraying has been carried out without the knowledge or consent of the Canadian electorate;

THAT chemtrails in the atmosphere across Canada can only adversely affect the health of our population, especially children;

THAT Canadians have the inalienable right not to be sprayed with massive amounts of chemicals from the sky for whatever purpose;

Note the absolute confidence that the writer has that these contrails are carrying deliberately-added and dangerous chemicals and that the Canadian government must be aware of, if not behind it all.

 

One neurologist claims to have evidence of damage from aluminum nanoparticles.  I think he really does show that such particles are dangerous but note in his references he has nothing that ties them to high altitude release via chemtrails.

I tagged this post as ‘hoax’ but is that correct?  ’Innocently wrong’ isn’t specific enough.  The people at the meeting are not generally ignorant in scientific matters so the term doesn’t fit.  ”Insufficiently skeptical” does, as perhaps “overly suspicious”.  Such attitudes are also found in this video where a woman doesn’t think rainbows can happen anywhere but in the sky.

 

Provincial Park Images of the day: Wasaga Beach

What better place to go on a sunny day than Wasaga Beach Provincial Park, the world’s longest freshwater beach and the town I was born in?

The little guy is in front of more than 12 km of beach.

This sand was so powdery that we just can’t guess what animal made these tracks.  I realize now that I should have put my thumb in the pic for size comparisons.  My thumbnail would fill the gap between the upper and lower marks.  Large bug or small vert? Collingwood still has snow.There is no land to be seen at the horizon.  This might as well be the view from Sokcho.I have seen many of these little depressions in the sand but have never heard what causes them.  Still don’t know.
I took this pic to prove I waded out a little distance.  At ankle depth, the sun-warmed water was pleasant but well before knee depth, it turned icy! Ontario Parks truck making the rounds.

 

Ontario Parks

Friends of Wasaga Beach

Trip Advisor

Wye Marsh, April 29, 30

I have fairly big news: Surprises Aplenty is now employed!

 

Some time ago, I described my situation, moving back to Canada as leaving a job I love to find one that I can tolerate and earn enough to care for the family.  Well, I am lucky to have another job I expect to love but I don’t think it is one to keep the family in rice and kimchi.

 

My new employer, the Wye Marsh is an outdoor education centre that, well, have a look at the sorts of things I’ll be doing and working with. This beaver was walking across a field near a canoe launch point.

These red wing black bird are everywhere.

For the first time in at least five years, an osprey is using the purpose-built platform for nesting.

These pitcher plants live on nutrition-poor ground and supplement their fertilizer with insects drowned in their pitchers.

This Canada Goose mother is guarding her nest. I was told the names of both flowers – the yellow ones are not dandelions.

This snapping turtle was in such a hurry its legs blurred as it waddled.

Really, I’m not that old

…said plaintively.

 

Yesterday, I went to a wonderful store specializing in educational toys for children.  As I paid for my purchase, the cashier asked if I were a grandparent as there was a special.  I told her, no, and that I was a little angry.

Today, this came in the mail:

I must admit, I love the Grey Power commercial where the father is bummed out by his fiftieth birthday and only halfheartedly thanks his son for the new drill. Then, his wife gives him a grey power brochure and he is thrilled…but still pushes his son’s gift away while his son watches.

Anyway, I’m not a grandfather, nor am I fifty.  My first exposure to music was probably Smother Brothers Think Ethnic and the first music I owned was Dumb Ditties -on vinyl (Here is Bridget the Midget by some guy named Ray Stevens).  Actually, The Smothers Brothers were probably being banned around the time I was born, anyone who bought that album would be over fifty.

 

But not me, darnit!

Provincial Park Image of the day: Awenda in spring

My mother, son and I returned to Awenda Provincial Park on April 13 and had a good walk although no wildlife was spotted.

Again, we visited a beach and again, I admired the ice piles.

I could have walked out to them, I think.  The last four metres was of thick-but-broken-and-refrozen ice and where I could see water, something in the clarity wailed cold.  I was still going to do it, but my son was watching and I decided not to demonstrate what foolishness I am capable of.

We found one fin and one deer scapula (?) 

My son likes to be clear on where precisely he is.  When he learned we were just outside of Penetanguishene and in Tiny Township, he decided this line was the border and delighted in hopping in and out of Penetanguishene.

 

Since I’ve returned, deep views into forest have become fascinating to me but I cannot explain why or take a photo that offers the same pull.

Awenda has a small ampitheatre and stage.  I hope to hear some wildlife talks or the like there.

 

As the ice leaves, so do the animals

The ice melted around my home first, and now perhaps half of Penetanguishene Bay is ice-free.  When the only open water was near my home, I was treated to a wide variety of birds and mammals who had no other place to be.  I’m ready for warmer weather, but it was pretty cool to see both a muskrat and an otter only ten metres from each other – and even closer to me.  Not shown are the huge number of Mergansers that were too shy to allow me close enough to take pictures.

Skiing Awenda in the Winter (Provincial Park Photo(s) of the day)

I keep saying Awenda is little known, but perhaps I have merely been there on quiet days. The Friends of Awenda page  seems well done.

I had a great ski there with my mother on Friday and want to go back.  I’m lucky to have gotten this day in so I doubt I’ll make it next week.

One problem with skiing there is there are only two ‘official’ trails, a short, easy 4 km or a long 13 km.  I’ve managed 10 km in a day, more or less, but didn’t feel up to 13.  So we followed a ski trail to the beach.  It was around 5 km as a 2.5 km in and out on the same trail -no loop.  The map showed the beach route, but I think it was only as part of the regular map, only the two trails above were explicitly described.

The skiing scratched an itch I didn’t know I had.  The silence was total and I felt like a church-farter when I yelled a comment to my mother.

among the giants

 

 

 

 

 

I think this is Christian Island.

 

The pictures above and below show how cold it can be.  You can see that the waves froze in mid-surge.

 

On the way to the park, we saw a fox run across the road.  The first I have seen in Ontario.  Midland Naturalists reported in February seeing 22 deer at one time in the park but we saw none.  There many tracks of many different animals but none actually seen.

I have decided to add a mark to the bottom of my pictures.  I have never previously worried about copyright or intellectual property theft (the benefit of being a poor photographer, I guess) and the writing is low enough to be cropped out if someone wanted to.  I welcome the idea of others using my pictures but want to keep some kind of identifying mark on them.  Suggestions? Ideas? Should I have the full url for my blog?

Domesticated, feral, and wild animals

2 updates at the end of the post

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Original:

Why do we have pets? I grew up constantly having an animal companion. We almost continuously had a dog and cat, but also for short periods, a turtle, a salamander, newts, a hamster, a guinea pig, and/or goldfish. The ideal home for me would be one like Farley Mowat’s.   I don’t know if I could properly or with-scientific-references defend the idea that pets are good for their owners. I definitely believe this is the case, though.
Is it good for the pets themselves? This time my affirmation is less confident. Michael Pollan offers the great success of chicken and other fowl as part of his support for eating meat. If we didn’t eat meat, chicken would likely be extinct.
Ted Kerasote might offer an opposing view in his book Merle’s Door, an account of his attempts to offer his dog as much freedom as possible and how pets thrive when they aren’t treated as modern-day pets. The life of a modern pet is long periods of boredom mixed with attempts to be stimulated by their owners.
As part of this long introduction, let me ask a different and more specific question, one that I cannot answer. Should we have pet cats?
I love cats; there is one sitting at ease just outside my doorway, and my son would need therapy if I got rid of it. The negative points are more important to my post today so let me focus on the positives first. They entertain and comfort us. Some kill pests. They are little burden and bring great joy.
This post is not about the sadness that comes with the inevitable death of a beloved pet. This is a serious concern and my son is already asking questions about lifespans and death.
No, this post is principly about feral cats and secondarily about wildlife mortality caused by pet and feral cats.

According to National Geographic News, last week,

” Ted Williams, then editor-at-large for Audubon Magazine, advocated for trapping and euthanizing feral cats due to their rampant hunting of birds and their reputation for carrying diseases like toxoplasmosis.”
More from the article:
Over 80 million pet cats reside in U.S. homes and as many as 80 million more free-roaming cats survive outside.
…
To David Ringer, director of media relations for the Audubon Society, the dust-up shows “that we all need to work together on effective strategies that will address the very serious harm cats inflict on birds and other wildlife and that are also truly humane toward cats,” he told National Geographic by email.

“Cats do a great deal of damage to birds and other wildlife, and it needs to be addressed, but Audubon absolutely rejects the idea of individuals harming or poisoning cats.”

From the comments, I find myself agreeing most with Pete McLean who argues against protection all cats at all costs. “The entire argument is a stupid juvenile argument from lovers of stuffed toys.”
The article discusses some methods of feral cat population control. Apparently, Tylenol is unusually toxic to cats and could be used as a relatively specific poison that wouldn’t do much harm to other animals. Another proposed method is neutering or spaying.
Before going into my opinions, let me quote articles from South Korea that I discussed three years ago.  There I quoted from a touchingly sensitive article in Yonhap News.

 ”Controversy over treatment of cats often makes headlines. In 2006, residents of a Seoul apartment culled scores of stray cats by driving them into the basement of their building and cementing over all exit holes.

Last year, the local government of Geomun Island off the southwestern coast moved to cull hundreds of feral cats overpopulating the fishing region, a controversial decision that was changed at the last minute to neutering them.”

Alright, first, the problem is not merely feral cats; happily domesticated cats are mixed in too. Tylenol might specifically kill cats but it will not further specify only feral cats. Feral cats are not the only predators of urban wildlife either. In all the time we had a cat, it typically wanted out in the evening and in again in the morning, often trying to bring the night’s kill in with it. And these were well-fed cats who needed to kill only as much as most North American human hunters.
I guess neutering or spaying would work in the long term even though new feral cats and fully potent domesticated cats are often entering the equation. I wonder if proponents of spaying would insist on a human-sort of tubal ligation so that the cats could continue to enjoy the attempts to procreate? In this case, clearly neutering males would be seen as equally evil: vasectomies all round!
I gotta say, I am for a humane cull. I would prefer it if humans could adopt every last feral cat -which are unlikely to make good pets -but an entirely reasonable, though distant, second best option involves poison, live traps leading to identification and killing (feral cats) or releasing (actual wildlife) or return and fines (loose domestic cats). I would even go so far as to train the killers (I don’t want use the euphemism of harvester or collector) to kill onsite with cheap, scalable techniques. There is no more reason to have an expensively trained trained vet use (expensive?) injected poisons with cats than there is with chickens, pigs or cattle.
At the same time, cat owners, be responsible and care for and give away your pets properly. That last paragraph was hard to write and I don’t want my little friend to ever suffer like that.

 

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UPDATE 1:
Ted Williams lost his job for posting concern over the number of feral cats and how to reduce that number.  Well, he lost his job briefly.  I don’t know if this is an apology (or that he needed to apologize) or simply a better explanation than he included in his article.  Here is an excerpt:

 ”In my recent op-ed I reported that a common over-the-counter drug, an effective and selective poison for feral cats, had not been registered for this use because of pressure from feral-cat advocacy groups.”

“While the statement was not inaccurate, it was unwise because readers might construe it as a suggestion to go out and start poisoning feral cats. What’s more, the statement could be, indeed was, manipulated by feral-cat advocates into something I didn’t write or intend.”

Update 2:

Scientific American has an article that relates more to my commentary than Mr Williams’ predicament.  3,000 feral cats have been culled to protect an endangered species of bilby.

Unfortunately, the sanctuary is located in a relatively remote region of Currawinya National Park. Flooding in the park not only makes the sanctuary occasionally unreachable by humans, it also apparently damaged the fence last June, allowing several cats to make their way into the enclosure, with devastating results. “We estimated we could have had around 150 newborn bilbies inside that fence, and [the cats have] cleared the lot out,” Frank Manthey, co-founder of the Save the Bilby Fund, told the Australian network news show 7.30.

The fence has since been repaired, but Manthey says the surrounding countryside is still besieged by feral cats and has appealed to the government for help in reducing their numbers. Feral cat populations have actually risen in the past two years, an unintended side effect of government efforts to control dingo populations. Dingoes, which compete with cats and other predators for food, have been poisoned to protect agricultural sheep, but Griffith University researcher Jean-Marc Hero told The Australian last September that this approach gave cats and foxes a chance to fill the ecological gap the dingoes left behind.

A lesson from Springwater Provincial Park for Arrowhead

Thank you very much, Emily Mckiernan for your corrections and advice regarding a year-long all-parks day pass for Ontario Provincial Parks.  Summer and year-long passes can be found here.  Thanks also to Lisa Fleming who linked to my previous article about Springwater Park on the Facebook Save Our Springwater  page.

I hope their work goes rewarded although, as I’ve previously noted, I have not been in the area long enough to be greatly invested in the park.

I need to correct a mistake I made in my previous post. I wrote that I had been to Springwater two times but I have since learned that my parents took me there many times when I was a young child.  I don’t remember this at all.

A new article in the Barrie Examiner suggests that the work to close the park is continuing.  The article describes plans for the animals currently in the park to be moved to new locations.  Ah, the article describes the animals as ‘wildlife’, and the animals mostly fit that definition but these are animals:

“… that have been injured in the wild, or are unable for a variety of reasons, unable to survive in the wild. This makes it [Springwater] unique among parks and an especially valuable treasure: one of a kind. It is a legacy for future generations,” Miller said.

They are not removing every squirrel or free wild animal.  That would be a little creepy.

Also in the article:

Springwater is the only provincial park with an animal sanctuary,…[and has] 29 animals, including Monty the bobcat, a black bear, a timber wolf, two foxes (one red and one silver), two raccoons (one of them albino), two wild turkeys, a turkey vulture, a great horned owl, a peregrine falcon, a rough-legged hawk, a trumpeter swan, two mute swans, three Canada geese, four white tailed deer, two lynx, two bald eagles and two skunks

Finally

Two groups are leading the charge to keep the park operational.

They include the Springwater Park Citizens’ Coalition at www.SpringwaterParkcc.org and the Friends of Springwater Provincial Park at www.friendsofspringwaterpark.ca.

 

I think other Provincial parks need to take heed.  Algonquin, in my opinion, will always be here.  It is giant, famous and historic and just close enough to Toronto to be a daytrip.  Parks that I like and think are lesser known are Awenda and Arrowhead.  Arrowhead, get a Friends Of… group, get a real website, a Facebook page and more.  If you already have these things, I need to tell you that a Google search didn’t find them on the first page.  I did find this wordpress blog that looks like it is updated annually and dryly informative.  It does have a facebook page that looks well used.  Awenda could use one; this page needs work.

 

These are suggestions only.  I wonder how saturated people are with wilderness-based advertising.   Algonquin Outfitter’s Facebook page is updated nearly hourly. as is Pure Muskoka.  Well, even if the Facebook pages or other online content doesn’t attract many new visitors, it does a good job of maintaining the enthusiasm of longtime patrons.

What is RTO7 -Ontario Ministry of Tourism’s designation for the area (Regional Tourism Organization 7) doing to help Springwater – or Awenda?  And RTO12 for Arrowhead?

 

I am too newly returned to help Springwater in the way I would like, but I will do my best to post a Provincial Park image every day.

The closing of Springwater Park

On Saturday, my son and I visited Springwater Provincial Park. along with a few hundred others, to show support for the continued existence of the park which is slated to lose its status at the end of the month.  It is a great little park and everyone there had fun.

Springwater links:  Facebook, Barrie Examiner.

I will be sad to see the park go but I can’t claim to be heavily invested in it.  It is a great local park for Barrie but I have only visited it twice.  I guess I won’t be visiting it again as it will become a ‘non-operational’ park the beginning of April.  I think that means the cross country hiking or ski trails will continue to be open but the animal sanctuary, the unique part of the park, will be no more.

Animal sanctuaries are my thing.  I love seeing local wildlife close up and even as a young adult would call strangers walking down the street to see some raccoon or snake I had found.  The Robertcats (I convinced my son that it was too informal to call them ‘bobcats’) and lynx were the first I had seen ever. I even loved the “site vacant” signs with their explanation that the park did not buy or collect animals but only provide a home for those unable to return to the wild. This kind of viewing opportunity needs to be preserved.

The thing is, from a numbers standpoint, the park really should be shut down.  I said that several hundred people attended the Saturday gathering, but that is probably the same number as visited the park in two or three months last year.  This is a local secret that people only seem to learn about from word of mouth.

I hope Springwater stays open but I also hope other people and parks are taking a second look at marketing and public awareness.  I’ve been out of the country for thirteen years so perhaps my ability, or lack of, to name parks is no indicator of the average Ontarians’.  I looked at the Ontario Provincial Parks website and was happily surprised to see how many there are, and how many I didn’t know about in my neighbourhood.  Well, I might be a little upset, too.

Why aren’t these parks better known?  Springwater is a great park that I suspect no one knew about three months ago.  I only recently learned that Springwater has cross country ski trails.  Wish I’d known that in early February.

As I’ve repeatedly written, I’ve been away.  I am not sure what the responsibilities of a park are compared to the responsibilities of the “Friends of…”  Who is involved in marketing?  How professional are these groups.  Back in the nineties, I had thought “Friends of Algonquin Park” was a volunteer organization of enthusiasts.

The thing I want is for those responsible for Awenda Prov Park and Arrowhead Prov Park to be sure they are keeping their parks in the public’s eye.  These are two great places that I know about that don’t get much attention. I know nothing about Bass Lake, McCrae or Mara Provincial Parks even though I drive within 50kms of them twice or more a month.  Explorer’s Edge, are these parks are in your region of responsibility?

What advice can I give to the marketers?  Well, I have a few ideas.

First, when you make a website, Facebook page, Google+ or Twitter account, Keep Adding Content!  The Wye Marsh, a great place that also needs to be aware of its marketing, offers both a good and bad example.  The Facebook page Wye Marsh has four friends and five photos (all mine!).  It has been in operation for two years with no apparent support from Marsh management.  The Wye Marsh Wildlife Centre, another Facebook page, is full of what appears to be daily content.  Attention seems to attract attention.  Next to actual Wye Marsh generated content is more content made and prepared by the public.  Win-win.

Second, make sure you have accounts with the three media above (and more) and your own website.  Link between them.  Really, these two steps are all that is needed for basic Search Engine Optimization.

Third, plan some events and write about them now!  Don’t wait until news comes that your park will soon be shut down. Do it now.