The friendly crowMy memory is getting embarrassing. In naming Lily’s middle cub, we already had a Fred and we already had a Forest. I should have checked. Somebody suggested Flynn. That sounds familiar somehow, but I think it’s like my name and not another cub. It has to be a F-name to fit with Frankie and Frannie. I wanted a Fr-name, but can’t think of any. I’ll wait a day or two to see if a good name pops up.
The one crow that doesn’t fly away when it sees me in the window is the only one left. The others have gone south. I don’t know why this one stayed. It took years for this crow to become accustomed to me, but I doubt it is getting old. The record lifespan is 59 in captivity and 29 or 30 in the wild. I hope it’s not sick. What surprised me today was that it didn’t fly when I slowly went out on the deck less than 10 feet away. Finally it flew when I walked by 7 feet away to put sunflower seeds out for the hungry little birds and the red-bellied woodpecker that is still here.
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We’ve mentioned the successful diversionary feeding that relieved problems around Lake Tahoe during the drought and forest fire year of 2007. Wildlife officials said the worst thing would be to feed them because it would make problems worse the next year. The advice was to eliminate attractants so the bears would go back in the woods, but the reason people were seeing so many bears was because there was practically nothing to eat in the woods. People tried eliminating attractants, even cutting down fruit trees. About the only food available was inside houses and bears came into dozens of houses per day. After a couple bears brushed by gas stoves and accidentally turned them on, people got worried. Ann Bryant and her Bear League took the only action that made sense. They illegally put food in the woods. A peer-reviewed article by Steve Stringham and Ann Bryant tells the rest of the story at http://www.berrymaninstitute.org/files/uploads/pdf/journal/fall2015/StringhamFall2015.pdf . One bit of the ending is that the next spring, instead of bear problems being worse, they were below average.
Thank you for all you do.
Lynn Rogers, Biologist, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center