Our COVID-19 Stress Mirrors Stresses in Nature

A realization hit me after an early trip to the grocery store pre-COVID-19 shutdown. Sections of shelves were bare, the usual, relied upon foods or products were missing or in short supply. Anxious faces, including mine, glanced right, left, and center, trying to make sense of these familiar, yet surreal surroundings. A critical element of our survival — ready access to food — was under threat. The burning question, how deep the threat and how long would it last? 

In the first weeks, toilet paper shortages created panic buying.

We now hear key medicines could become harder to get, threatening the lives of people with health issues like diabetes. Without creative thinking (perhaps self-control) contraceptive shortages will definitely change people’s lives. There are concerns that during the outbreak hospitals will be unavailable or unsafe for mothers giving birth, especially those at high risk or in rural areas.

Second only to people getting sick or dying from the virus, all but essential businesses are shuttered, employees let go or laid off. The ability to raise money, a driving reality in all our lives, means society’s underpinnings have weakened and the bottom-line security for many is gone or deeply damaged. And we are creatures who hate confinement.

For many years, I’ve been involved in one aspect of the environment or another, lately on pollinator conservation. Conditions affecting the lives of other creatures suddenly seem all-too-true for human beings. Due to the COVID-19 virus are we not facing similar realities that the natural world has faced every day for a century? The biggest impact? Stress levels have skyrocketed.  

Stress is the inability of an animal to adequately deal with its environment. Whether a lack of food, water, shelter, medicine, disease, pollution, climate changes, and freedom of movement, without basic securities all animals suffer some level of stress. All stress affects our ability to be productive even survive. 

What the COVID-19 pandemic challenges remind me is that many animals in our world experience similar trials attempting to survive and produce a successful next generation. On a daily basis, their world is not about fulfillment, it’s about scarcity. While a large number of people in this country and around the world endure lives steeped in scarcity, most of us don’t. We expect so much to be at our fingertips. As if it is our right.

Food: A trip to the grocery store should be easy, right? We know where the food is. We buy what we like and can afford. Heaven forbid our favorite pasta sauce should be our-of-stock for two weeks, or the “must-have” out-of-season fruit is tasteless and “too” expensive. 

Medicine: Although there’s a lot wrong with the system (sometimes the care), we get treatment if we are sick or need mental health support.

Housing: The majority of people have adequate, if not superior, shelter. 

Communication and connection: In a flash, we connect with the small circle of those we love or with millions of virtual “friends” and strangers. Various forms of entertainment help us relax or deal with stress. If we’ve the money, we can change scenery and get access to anything we want or need. 

How many animals experience anything remotely close to these basic securities in their lives? Fewer every day. In order to create our real and imagined living and entertainment needs, habitat loss has escalated so sharply much of the natural world is in crisis, in some areas to serious levels. Given the rates of some changes, the ability to adapt and change for most animals is limited if not impossible. 

Food supplies, medicinal and host plants needed to survive, produce the next generation or provide shelter are reduced or gone, replaced by crops, lawn and hybrid plants. Many of these as useless to wildlife as a plastic cup. 

Wild and domestic bees use nectar from some plants to rid themselves of parasites. Without these plants, bee health goes down or death can occur.

Water is limited or diverted, streams and wetlands covered, breeding grounds lost to development or agriculture. Communication corridors (think courting whales, birds, insects, amphibians) are overrun with noise — shipping, undersea military explosions, airplanes, automobiles. Pesticides and pollutions harm us all, but the smallest in the food chain the most and the most immediate.

We’re all affected by changes that have happened to the planet since the beginning of the Industrial Age. We’ve just been too self-consumed and too noisy to experience the cost. 

COVID-19 has generated stress levels unknown for decades, maybe centuries. It has also granted us many gifts. Perhaps the most precious and important is the quiet.

Nature feels it too. If it knew how to thank this deadly disease, I think it would. 

We have this brief chance to notice, to pay attention, and to hear. What will change if we see our own struggles mirrored in the nature around us? If we better appreciate how we’re not so different? To feel the importance of not only filling our basic needs, but also what it means to go without. What will it take to imagine and live ways of change? 

 

Habitats

It’s World Habitat Day. Don’t you love these “recognition” days, helping us remember and think about important stuff? Well, maybe some aren’t so monumental, but Habitat/habitat, regardless of where and how you live, is the biggest issue we’ve got. It covers everything. Continue reading

Pollinator Week 2018 ~ It Takes a Neighborhood

painted lady on sunflower 'Choco Sun'-Katy Pye

Painted Lady on ‘Choco Sun’ sunflower

It’s the middle of National Pollinator Week. We’re headed for the heart of summer and peak pollinator activity. I hope things are buzzing, fluttering, and chirping at your house these days. They are around here. Spring and early summer are my favorite seasons with pollinators scouting out and feasting on our garden and local wildland flowers. Each bloom contributes to the lives and renewal of some of the most valuable and vulnerable species on the planet. 

So, I was dismayed when my daughter told me someone was stealing sunflowers from her wildflower/pollinator patch. We decided her best response was to turn upset into an educational opportunity. She put up a poster I’d designed for an event and added a Please Don’t Steal sign. We made packets of California poppy, sunflower, and hollyhock seeds she collected last year and put them in a “Take one” box in her front yard. The neighbors were delighted. 
Continue reading

Florida Sea Turtles in Irma’s Path

Photo: pixabay

On the heals of devastating hurricane Harvey in Texas, Irma barrels toward Florida this weekend, putting thousands of people, domestic animals, and wildlife, including endangered sea turtles, in jeopardy. Sea turtle rehabilitation facilities that care for injured turtles have been working ’round the clock, preparing for the worst.

According to Dr. Charles Manire, veterinarian and director of research and rehab at Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Juno Beach, FL, past experience proves there’s no safe place in Florida for sea turtles in a hurricane—especially corkers like Irma. In this video he anticipates the Center turtles’ move well inland to the Georgia Aquarium.

Texas Aftermath

I visited the University of Texas’ non-public facility, Animal Rehabilitation Keep (ARK) in Port Aransas, Texas while researching my novel, Elizabeth’s Landing. Unfortunately, the facility sustained severe damage, but I was glad to hear the wildlife in its care and the staff were unhurt. 

ARK facility during my visit in 2010. Photo: Katy Pye

Other key nesting and conservation facilities like Padre and South Padre Islands south of Corpus Christie escaped a Harvey hit.

HOW HURRICANES AFFECT SEA TURTLES

Off shore

Destructive impacts of a hurricane begin before the storm reaches shore. The storm’s wind energy mixes warm surface and deeper cold waters, lowering salt levels. Wave size increases, damaging underwater formations and stirring up tremendous loads of sand from the bottom. The food web for numerous species can be altered, short and long-term.

Storm’s landfall

Relocating sea turtle eggs is done but it is delicate, even under ideal conditions. Once the storm hits land, storm surges have deadly impacts on existing nests or nesting turtles. Eggs can drown or become exposed, scattered, and destroyed. Adult or emerging hatchlings are also at high risk.

Loggerhead sea turtle coming onshore to lay eggs. Photo: NOAA

However, according to Joe Scarola, a biologist for Ecological Associates Inc., a company that monitors sea turtle nests, Irma’s timing comes when the majority of eggs this season have already hatched. Nesting season continues through the end of October in Florida, so there’s a chance more eggs will be laid. Still it’s hard not to imagine thousands of recently hatched, 2″ turtles aren’t having a harrowing experience in today’s raging seas.

The very good news is it’s been a banner year for Florida sea turtle nests. Loggerhead Marinelife Center reports over 19,000 loggerhead, green, and leatherback nests on four beaches it monitors. Other groups also report many more nests in their regions.

Rehabilitating and protecting sea turtles is very expensive. Please consider a donation of any size to the organizations working valiantly to save them. Find one in your area here.

NOTE: If you come across eggs or stranded sea turtles of any size, report them to a local wildlife authority or sea turtle rescue and rehabilitation organization.

Stay safe.

Sea Turtle Flesh & Eggs Serious Health Threat

Kemp's ridley nester

Kemp’s ridley nester

Nesting for many sea turtles is going well this season — a thumbs up and huzzah to everyone, working to aid, repopulate, and love these wonderful creatures. 

On the downside, poaching activities for sea turtle eggs and meat continues in Asia, Mexico, and countries like Costa Rica, where volunteers were seriously threatened last month by a gang perhaps linked to drug trafficking. In some cultures, sea turtles, like other wild (many threatened or endangered) species’ parts or eggs are believed to have aphrodisiac properties when consumed. Apparently, there are risks (of more than a belly-ache) in that special Saturday-night-delight meal. 

Slaughtered Vietnamese sea turtle trade

Up to eight tons of dead endangered sea turtles were seized in central Vietnam in Dec. 2014 , after 4 tons where of the same were confiscated in November 2014. They cost abt. $9US each from fishermen and, turned into jewelry that can sell for $34+/- each piece.

Changing or creating newer, healthier beliefs of any sort is difficult. Perhaps news out of Popular Science (written by Jason Tetrowill send winds of change around the globe: sea turtles can be dangerous to your health and to the health of those you love.Along with Salmonella and e Coli, Tetro reports: 

“One of the bacterial genera found within the turtle microbial population is Vibrio. It’s best known for V. cholerae species, the cause of cholera. But another species, V. parahaemolyticus, has been growing in prevalence across the globe. It causes gastroenteritis, wound infection, ear infection and has the potential to cause scepticemia. A third species, V. alginolyticus is less concerning as a pathogen but has caused close to 10% of Vibrio infections at least in one American study.” Jason Tetro

Electron scanning microscopy of V. parahaemolyticus cells attached to the shell of a crab. Photo courtesy of Carla Ster and Rohinee Paranjpye.

Electron scanning microscopy of V. parahaemolyticus cells attached
to the shell of a crab. Photo courtesy of Carla Ster and Rohinee Paranjpye.

And some of these diseases are resistant to antibiotics, leading, in some cases, long-term implications for the patient. Bacteria that may cause illnesses in people  live on the outside of sea turtles, too.

As research on sea turtles continues, it’s time to get the word out, to shift to new belief systems. Someone, please, find a an invasive weed and spread the word it’s the new, better Viagra. May bundles of otherwise useless vegetation sway, drying in the breeze, in once sea turtle slaughter huts. 

 

World Oceans Day 2015: Tackling Marine Debris – Success Stories

Marine debris ~

Man-made waste accidentally or deliberately contributed to lakes, streams, seas, and oceans.

Nels Israelson-Flikr

Nels Israelson – Flickr

Plastic pollution leads the pack of insults, but as the powerful photo above attests, derelict fishing gear (DFG) adds untold insults to mounting injuries.

Some days reading environmental news sends an emotional death ray into my hope for our planet. I end up deflated as an old tire. This World Oceans Day, I decided sharing a few success stories might put the spin back in my wheels.

Beach cleanup sponsored by Sustainable Coastlines

Beach cleanup sponsored by Sustainable Coastlines

Every year hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of people gather to reclaim from, or keep trash out of, our oceans, seas, and other waterways. Some gather for a day. For others cleanup is a career. Here are a few examples of what’s working.

The Ocean Conservancy’s annual INTERNATIONAL COASTAL CLEANUP

2014 Results

561,895 volunteers in 91 countries collected 16,186,759 pounds (7,226 metric tons) of trash over 13,360 miles. One of the most unusual finds was $1,680 in cash. Largest “pieces” haul – cigarette butts – 2,117,931 of them. Ick. See if you can give up any of the Top 10 Items Found. I bought glass and stainless drinking straws and re-useable bamboo picnic ware to keep in the car. They make great presents, too.

Texas beach trash-collected 2010I’m extremely lucky to live near the ocean. Our local harbor supports a fair number of fishing boats. In the winter and spring, we have fresh Dungeness crab, and salmon and  local fish during other times of the year. Crab pots and derelict fishing gear are ongoing dangers to marine life, boats, and economic livelihoods in many fisheries. Sustainable solutions often mean partnerships between the fishing industry, states, non-profits, and federal government agencies, like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

CRAB POT RETRIEVAL, REUSE, RECYCLE PROGRAMS

Examples:

In 2009, NOAA’s Marine Debris Program employed off-season crab fishermen to remove nearly 3,000 derelict crab pots from Oregon’s coastal waters. The Program’s Fishing for Energy funds paid for disposal bins along the coast where fishermen could discard used gear for free. A steel company recycled and sheared the waste, and an energy company  burned ropes and nets as renewable fuel. The program was so successful, it will continue to remove additional pots through an industry-led partnership of the Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission, state Department of Fish and Wildlife, and NOAA.

The University of California School of Veterinary Medicine, the SeaDoc Society, and the Humboldt, CA Fishermen’s Marketing Association also have a pilot program to retrieve derelict crab pots. With i.d. info from the pot’s tag, they locate the original owner and offer  them the pots for less than half the cost of a new one. Sales support future cleanups and unsold gear is recycled. Five hundred and fifty pots were collected in just two months this year. Program video (2:39)

Fishermen in North Carolina’s Pamlico Sound (through another NOAA partnership), are collecting and re-purposing 4 to 7 tons of crab pot material into 700 linear feet of oyster reefs. The goal is to rebuild the local, Eastern oyster fishing industry.

GHOST “Legacy” NETS

Diving for Debris-Fishing net removal boat. Photo courtesy of NOAA

Diving for Debris-Fishing net removal boat. Photo courtesy of NOAA

Abandoned gill nets are made of non-biodegradable mono or multifilament line. Fish and other marine life continue to be snared in this “ghost fishing.” Their value is lost to the environment and to the fishing economy. The inland ocean waters of Puget Sound was a burial ground for thousands of these legacy nets. Over the last decade the Northwest Straits Foundation, working with professional divers, NOAA’s Marine Debris Program, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, state agencies, and others, has removed all 5,600 abandoned and dangerous nets. Talk about success. “Diving for Debris” Program video (6:04)

THE FUN FOR LAST

I am SO stoked about the Marine Debris Tracker app. A collaboration between NOAA’s Marine Debris Program and the University of Georgia’s Southeast Atlantic Marine Debris Initiative, this free app for Apple and Android smartphones and tablets turns you into a citizen trash scientist. Download the app, track, and log your trash collection sites (through GPS), regardless of where you are in the world and whether you’re on a beach, on the ocean, your street, school, local stream ~ wherever. Your info goes into a growing global database, allowing scientists to better understand the world’s trash picture. From knowledge comes solution, right?MDT-2

This little free tool is so impressive it was included in Apple’s 25th Worldwide Developers Conference promotional video, “Apps We Can’t Live Without.” Oceans advocate Emily Penn, of Pangaea Exploration collects data on marine debris. MDT is an app she “can’t live without,” she told the Apple audience. Just think of the progress we could make if every kid with a smartphone or tablet starting tracking (and picking up) trash. 

I’m no Emily Penn, but my ipad’s loaded and a collection bag’s by the door ready for today’s test run. 

Ahh, I feel a lot better now. If you have an environmental success story (or you download MDT), please share your good news in the comments.

HAPPY WORLD OCEAN’S DAY!

Peace. Thanks for doing what you can.

P.S. The beautiful Monk seal in the opening photo was one of two rescued off Hawaii from this derelict net.

Monarch on poppy-Katy Pye

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BP Spill: Drilling for Good News 4 Years Later

oiled turtle-2 Blair Witherington

Oiled turtle
Blair Witherington

Four years after the Deepwater Horizon disaster it’s hard to find irrefutable good news. Billions of dollars and countless numbers of scientists and project staff are focused on understanding and fixing the large and lingering damage. Predictions about the future are cautious to non-existent. What’s clear is the Gulf and the creatures that depend on it are still struggling.

Food, habitat, next generations

CC seafood plateWhile tourists and locals in a news video shot in New Orleans said they had no health qualms about eating Gulf seafood, an oil industry worker/sports fisherman in a Fox News clip bemoaned the disappearance of red fish in his home waters. In a Reuter’s piece last week, Jules Melancon, “the last remaining oyster fisherman on Grand Isle,” says all his leased oyster beds are barren. Seven fishing grounds off the Louisiana coast remain closed.

Cat Island in Barataria Bay, Louisiana, once a teeming pelican rookery, is devoid of stabilizing vegetation. It’s wasting away. The oil/dispersant mix that soaked into the soil poisoned mangroves and all the other plants. The muck is still there, destroying any chance new vegetation will secure a toe-hold. Restoration has begun in some areas hit by the spill, but it’s expensive and slow-going.

A Jules Verne visit below

Researcher/oceanographer, Mandy Joyce of the University of Georgia is part of a team, making the first dives in four years to the Macondo well blow-out site.

U.S. Navy submersible, "ALVIN" used by the research team this month. Creative Commons photo

U.S. Navy submersible, “ALVIN” used by the research team this month.
Creative Commons photo

Where nothing survived four years ago, this week she saw eels, skates, and a vampire squid. Conclusion: recovery is happening. However the sea floor is covered in an inches-thick oiled layer. The long-term effects are unknown, and while heartened she cautioned not to extrapolate the positive signs across the entire area affected by the original spill.

Human health studies

The National Institute of Health (NIH) is in the early stages of its 10-year study on the human health impacts to those who lived in the area and worked on clean-up. It may be years, maybe never, before the true health effects of the spill are known. Many of the sick, lacking health insurance, can only wait and hope their claims survive the complicated bundle of paperwork and court battles between the government and BP.

Environmental monitoring group, Gulf Restoration Networkreports oil is still appearing on Louisiana’s Grand Isle beaches. They collected “thousands of tar balls” there April 9th, 2014. BP denies they are from the Macondo well, saying the tar balls are no threat to human health. (Reuters)

Compensation

BP has spent tens of billions of dollars in fines, clean-up, and compensation. That figure has almost doubled in court fights, the company attempting to overturn or delay payments. Locally, rifts have developed between claimants who have received settlements and those denied or still waiting. Lawyers have claimed a lion’s share. 

A failure to improve

In the meantime, BP has successfully bid on 24 blocks offered for lease in the Gulf of Mexico. These are the company’s first new U.S. offshore leases in two years, which include government approval for deep-water drilling.  

Creative commons photo

Creative commons photo

According to a disturbing New York Times OpEd article (4/17/2014) nothing has changed in terms of engineering refinements on any deep water operations. The Obama Administration “…still has not taken key steps recommended by its experts and experts it commissioned to increase drilling safety. As a result, we are on a course to repeat our mistakes. Making matters worse, the administration proposes to expand off-shore drilling in the Atlantic and allow seismic activities harmful to ocean life in the search for new oil reserves.” (Liz Birnbaum, former head of the Minerals Management Service, industry regulatory agency at the time of the Macondo blow-out and Jacqueline Savitz, vice president for U.S. Oceans at Oceana.)

New leases for deepwater drilling are handed out to companies every year, yet improved regulations and design requirements on blow-out preventers promised four years ago remain non-existent. “The N.A.E. (National Academy of Engineering) report warned that a blowout in deep water may not be controllable with current technology,” the N.Y.Times piece concluded. 

Business as usual.

OKAY, TODAY’S GOOD NEWS! 

I was at a low ebb this afternoon after researching articles for this post, when in came an e-mail from Adrienne McCracken. She’s the Field Operations Manager for Loggerhead Marine Life Center in Juno Beach, Florida. Adrienne’s Kemp’s ridley hatchling is the eye-catching baby turtle on the cover of my novel, Elizabeth’s Landing

Sea turtle crawl track, Juno Beach FL 4/20/2014. Photo by Adrienne McCracken, Loggerhead Marine Life Center.

Leatherback sea turtle crawl track, Juno Beach FL 4/20/2014. Photo by Adrienne McCracken, Loggerhead Marine Life Center.

She said, “Happy Easter! We had our own version of an egg hunt this morning with a leatherback and a loggerhead nest…” Whoo-hoo! Life goes on, and as Maria the biologist in the book tells Elizabeth, “It’s a one-turtle-at-a-time job.” This morning Adrienne and her group enjoyed two, with hope for 200+/- hatchlings in a few months. Thank you Loggerhead Marinelife Center, and all sea turtle conservation groups for being on the beaches year-round.

Loggerhead Marinelife Center Field Staff, Shelby, flagging a Loggerhead nest 4/20/2014.

Loggerhead Marinelife Center Field Technician, Shelby, flagging a Loggerhead nest 4/20/2014. Photo by Sarah Hirsch

The second piece of good news, at least for me, came yesterday from the Nautilus Book AwardsElizabeth’s Landing earned a 2014 SILVER award for Young Adult Fiction. Last year, Nautilus GOLD and SILVER award winners included three authors I love: Barbara Kingsolver for Flight Behavior, Louise Erdrich for The Round House, and Brene’ Brown for Daring GreatlyIn April, Elizabeth’s Landing was awarded FIRST PLACE in Fiction in Writer’s Digest’s 2013 “Self-published e-book Awards. I am deeply honored by both awards and hope they help bring more attention to the desperate plight of all sea turtles.

NAUTILUS SILVER - YOUNG ADULT FICTION 2014

 

It’s spring, and with it comes new energy and possibility. Bloom where you can.

Delphinium nudicaule Photo: Katy Pye

Delphinium nudicaule
Photo: Katy Pye

6 Ways to Celebrate-and Help Save-Pacific Leatherbacks Join Their Conservation Day 10/15/13

Numero Uno~
Watch this beautiful video of Lula by filmmaker, Boombaye

author tuttle for .28 hi

The Ancient Past

Leatherbacks are the largest sea turtle species (up to 6 ft long, 2000 lbs), arguably not the prettiest, but certainly the deepest divers. While not as old as sharks at 320 million years (here even before trees), leatherbacks, like all sea turtle species, are ancient creatures–over 100 million years on the planet.

Archelon skeleton, an ancient sea turtle. Photo from the Peabody Museum at Yale. 80.5 million years old

Archelon skeleton, an ancient sea turtle, 80.5 million years old. Photo Wikipedia, from the Peabody Museum at Yale.

The ancient Archelon above, believed to be a direct ancestor to the leatherback, was swimming the oceans in what is now South Dakota.

Fast forward–skidding toward the cliff?

Here we sit 100 million years later, staring into the barrel of extinction for the glorious, ponderous Pacific leatherback. Important Western Pacific nesting sites have dropped 78% in 30 years. Higher global temps warm nesting sands, leading to male-only hatches.

Leatherback_sea_turtle_CC-ryan Somma

Leatherback sea turtle
Photo: Ryan Somma, Creative Commons

Recognizing the Pacific leatherback’s peril and the importance of jellyfish feeding grounds off the Golden State (a stunning 7,000-mile migration), legislators placed restrictions on fishing practices and created fishing exclusion zones along the California coast. Oregon and Washington adopted similar restrictions in an effort to protect and extend loggerhead migration and feeding territory. In 2012, California designated the Pacific leatherback our State Marine Mammal. The annual celebration day, October 15th, is a chance to remember they’re here, but more importantly to recognize their escalating decline and double down on conservation efforts. Nothing short of rapier-sharp vigilance, hard work, and strong education efforts will ensure the Pacific loggerheads’ future.

Let’s start with the fun (subtext: cheerful education leads to action).

Celebration ideas: 

Leatherback hatchling Photograph: Scott Benson NOAA

Leatherback hatchling
Photograph: Scott Benson NOAA

2) Spread the word! Visit Sea Turtle Conservation Program’s list of celebration ideas. I’ve taken the pledge, visited, “Liked,” and shared the Leatherback’s Celebration Facebook page. Read, share or gift books about sea turtles. Fiction or non-fiction, there’s something out there for all ages.

3) Collect and cut out the plastic! Plastic and beach debris collection is paramount to keeping litter out of the mouths and guts of sea turtles (leatherbacks are particularly prone to eating any plastic, including balloons, that looks like a jellyfish). Beach debris can block hatchlings from reaching the ocean and make them more vulnerable to predators.

   A challenge: try going without plastic for 1 week. track how much and what plastic you avoided using or buying. Post what you learned here, your own blog, Facebook, etc. What can you turn into permanent changes to your plastic use? My Plastic Free Life is an encouraging and practical blog (and book) to make the shift a whole lot easier. Here are two products I’ve adopted. Eliminated plastic shampoo and cream rinse bottles and plastic floss container. Love both products.

Almost plastic free. Floss roll is in a little plastic bag to keep the mint oil fresher, longer.

Almost plastic free. Floss roll is in a paper box, but uses a little plastic bag inside to keep the mint oil fresher, longer. Unflavored floss and non-plastic toothbrush next on the list.

Celebrating=balloons, right? WRONG! Balloons and their ribbons deplete scarce and dwindling helium supplies (critical to medicine and science), drift for miles, and end up as deadly trash for sea turtles, mammal marine life, and birds. Balloons Blow has festive, safe alternatives and more information.

4) Food fun. Bake dinner rolls, breakfast treats, or breads in the shape of sea turtles to give to friends and family with info about loggerheads and the Celebration Day.

Boudin Bakery Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco, CA © BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons.

Boudin Bakery Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco, CA © BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons.

How about turtle cupcakes to give out in class with a note asking people to reduce plastic use and to learn about sea turtles. Give them a link or three to your favorite leatherback websites, photos, or articles.

     Healthier alternatives? Make a turtle-shaped fruit bowl from a watermelon. Invite the neighborhood in. Here’s a charming, and edible, fable about how land turtles went to the sea (complete with carved vegetable and egg turtle characters and curry recipe) from VegSpinz.

5) Artistic Fun. Halloween’s coming. Carve a turtle image into your pumpkin and hand out info on how balloons can turn into real-life “ghouls” for wildlife.

see link above for more ideas, or create your own

see link above for more ideas, or create your own

6) Donate. Leatherback sea turtles, like every endangered species, hugely depend on us human beings stepping up to solve problems driving them to extinction. Species celebration days are reminders of our part and our responsibilities.

Give, if you can, money, time, and/or talent to your favorite sea turtle organizations. Two that work for Pacific leatherbacks are Sea Turtle Restoration Project, Sea Turtles Forever and See Turtles (eco trips to work with leatherbacks).

Re-post this blog or find others. Then reach deeper and farther. If petitions cross your social media or e-mail, ones asking governments to enforce turtle protection laws, please read and consider signing because…

Threats to leatherbacks (and many other sea turtles) continue to grow:

Egg and turtle predation: by humans and animals. Poaching (with increasing links to drug use and trafficking) in third-world countries tops the list of species decline. Quasi-legal egg collection is sometimes part of agreements between locals and turtle conservationists who share the eggs for mutual benefit (80%/20% for example in Guatamala). One group for livelihood and food. The other for hatch and release. 

Longline and shrimp bottom trawl shrimp fishing (pelagic longline fishing is now banned off CA, OR, and WA coast).

However, “Spiraling loggerhead deaths (are) linked to fishing gear off Baja California” October 2, 2013. “This year, 705 dead loggerheads were reported by officials”… in two months. “Scientists say the official numbers are far below the reality.”

leatherback caught in long-line fishing gear. Photo by Philip Miller Creative Commons via Seaturtle.org

leatherback caught in long-line fishing gear. Goes from being a turtle to being “by-catch” of the fishing industry. This turtle was cut free and returned to life as a turtle. Photo by Philip Miller Creative Commons via Seaturtle.org

Up to half the leatherback turtles each year are caught and killed or injured in longline fisheries. They continue to drown in shrimp nets due to lack of Turtle Excluder Device rule enforcement and low fines. Longline targets migratory fish species: tuna, swordfish, and halibut and the rapid reduction in the numbers of Pacific leatherbacks may be telling us current regs and practices aren’t working.

Marine pollution: After fishing, THE MAJOR CAUSE OF DEATH among adult leatherbacks: plastic bags, styrofoam, and other marine debris that mimic their food–jellyfish. Entanglement and drowning in fishing gear, oil spills, and boat strikes also take their toll.

Beach development: Increased erosion and night lights disorient hatchlings who head toward the brightest light, their guide to the horizon and water. They end up in someone’s patio or mired in dune grass instead.

Sea Turtles Forever has “established a Sea Turtle Hotline for people to report sea turtle sightings in the Northeastern Pacific foraging areas. Please call 1-503-739-1446 or e-mail us at info@seaturtleforever.com to report a sea turtle sighting in the Northeastern Pacific Ocean or on any Canadian, Washington, Oregon or California Beaches.”

Other information sources used in this blog.

Marc Carvajal, San Francisco State University (The Biogeography of Leatherback Sea Turtles); Sea Turtle Restoration Project (“Amazing Facts About Leatherbacks” pdf download); Wikipedia.

________________________________________________________________

For a true-to-life sea turtle and family saga, visit Elizabeth’s Landing: a novel by Katy Pye

Ages 10 to adult. Widely available in paperback and e-books.

I donate part of book sale profits to sea turtle conservation programs. 

//

Ban a Book, Shrink a Thinker- Banned Books Week – 2013

mvc library news

Image from MVC Library News

“Did you ever hear anyone say, ‘That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me.’?” Joseph Henry Jackson (1894-1955) in the San Francisco Chronicle (1953)

There’s a red circle around that quote (among scores of others) in my Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. It was summer, I was fourteen and looking for light. I found it in Bartlett. Sentence after paragraph culled from its pages worked to dislodge me from childhood, discover and armor my own beliefs against perceived and real injustices, parental bans, hurts and longings. John Bartlett’s collection opened my conservative, small-town world and mind, encouraging my increasing bids for freedom.

Despite my experience, when my daughter reached pre-teens, I cultivated lots of opinions about the world around her. The one cloaking her days (or trying to) with some views, behaviors, and fads I neither shared nor approved. In a busy life of work, school, and raising her, it was easier to say, “Not for you, not now,” or “because I said so,” without much discussion. I wish she’d heard more often, “Tell me about it. What interests you?” and “This is what interests or bothers me.”

Sometimes parents, rightly, have to invoke the dreaded, “No.” As I used to tell her, “It’s part of my job.” Operating as source material for her hurt or anger was tough. Still, enough of my lines in the sand were, for lack of a better term, “right,” even by her, now adult, reflections. What I regret is not letting her stretch the leash farther, take more risks while I risked freeing more of my fears, then watched, and waited. And talked less. Maybe she could have, like me with my Bartlett’s, tested her changing world against her own thoughts, backed by someone she trusted. Someone who got out of her way as far as she needed, and no further.

There are books I don’t enjoy, some pushed at kids, or ones they seem to feed on. Ones I rail privately against. But ask a library to ban a book? Never. Not in a million, ziliion years. Growing up means finding your own way, building and knowing your own mind, owning your own life. Books support the journey. Books we cherish, ones that bore, even ones we despise. Books teach us how to stand separate and manage our part of life’s whole–our place in earth’s community. To broadly paraphrase Gary Snyder from The Practice of the Wild: we start as children at the fire pit called home, “from which all tentative explorations go outward…and it is back to the fireside that elders return.”

I’m buying at least one banned book today.

banned book week

The American Library Association’s list of frequently banned or challenged books. How many have you read? Are you surprised to find your favorites on a list? Leave them in the comment section

Interested in the “reasoning” behind bans or challenges to the “Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century”? (Radcliff Publishing Course). Or at Banned Books Awareness.

Here are a few of my favorite children’s/young adult books on the lists:

The Lorax, by Dr. Suess; A Light in the Attic, by Shel Silverstein; Strega Nona, by Tomie DePaola; Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen, by Maurice Sendak; Charlotte’s Web by E.B White; To Kill a Mockingbird  by Harper Lee; Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George; Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou; Lord of the Flies by William Golding; The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie; Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher.

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A Georgian-age 9-Challenges State: Save Turtles From Deadly Balloons

Activist, author, and $1,000 Kohl’s Cares Scholarship winner, Cameron (Amie) Koporc has done more for sea turtles than most people think of doing in half a lifetime. Now she’s started a petition at Change.org to get legislators to make Georgia the 7th state to protect wildlife and reduce pollution by outlawing mass balloon releases.

Balloons and ribbons--beautiful killers.

Balloons and ribbons–beautiful killers.

A former resident of Florida, now living in the Atlanta Georgia suburb of Roswell, Amie’s learned a lot about sea turtles since her family adopted a sea turtle nest in her name as a 7th birthday present. She recently told the Roswell Neighbor news journal, “When I grow up I want to work in a rescue center for ocean animals. I just hope it isn’t too late by then.” So do I, but she’s working hard to make sure turtles and other animals remain part of the planet’s ecosystems forever.

This Blaire Wirthington photo on my website page Threats to Sea Turtles illustrates what can happen when a balloon ends up at sea. This little Kemp’s ridley was lucky someone spotted him. The ribbon or string can be as deadly as the balloons.

Kemp's ridley juvenile from 65 NM west of Sarasota FL. The turtle had ingested the latex end of a toy balloon.

Ribbon trail of the balloon swallowed by a Kemp’s ridley juvenile off the Sarasota, FL coast. Photo: Blair Wirthington
photo, Blair Witherington (http://myd.as/p6429)

While Amie’s petition is directed at influencing Georgia politicians, sea turtles, birds, and people everywhere are impacted by balloon trash. All states should get the message, so each one added works to tip permanent change in the right direction. As of this writing, Amie has upped her signature goal to 2500 and is 408 signatures shy. Help by adding yours.

Still think balloons are harmless? Take a look at Balloons Blow’s photo gallery of what can happen when balloons are enjoyed without thought to what happens when they come down, pop, and no longer fun. Take a minute to look at all these ideas for celebrating, memorializing, and getting attention WITHOUT balloons. Most add to the planet or the animals and people on it, they don’t just decorate. This “follow me” balloon was left behind in my neighborhood today after a weekend open house.
open house balloon left behind
Thanks to Amie and her family for all they are doing to take a stand for sea turtles and the planet! I hope to find her book Juno’s Journey in print someday!
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