Tag: New England

A mast year for acorns in New England

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❝ If you have oak trees in your neighborhood, perhaps you’ve noticed that some years the ground is carpeted with their acorns, and some years there are hardly any. Biologists call this pattern, in which all the oak trees for miles around make either lots of acorns or almost none, “masting.”

In New England, naturalists have declared this fall a mast year for oaks: All the trees are making tons of acorns all at the same time…

❝ For trees like oaks that depend on having their seeds carried away from the parent tree and buried by animals like squirrels, a mast year has an extra benefit. When there are lots of nuts, squirrels bury more of them instead of eating them immediately, spreading oaks across the landscape.

❝ Whatever the causes, masting has consequences that flow up and down the food chain.

For instance, rodent populations often boom in response to high seed production. This in turn results in more food for rodent-eating predators like hawks and foxes; lower nesting success for songbirds, if rodents eat their eggs; and potentially higher risk of transmission of diseases like hantavirus to people.

If the low seed year that follows causes the rodent population to collapse, the effects are reversed.

Please, RTFA for discussion of other cause-and-effect relationships, possibilities…even maybe’s

Massachusetts offshore wind auction draws global competitors, big money

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David L. Ryan/GLOBE Staff/File

❝ The blockbuster auction for offshore wind leases that wrapped up Friday should leave few doubts: The industry has finally arrived in New England.

Three developers backed by major European energy companies paid a record $405 million to gain access to 390,000 acres of federal waters nearly 20 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. These firms will each pay $135 million to the federal government for the rights to build massive windmills in their respective slices of the ocean…

❝ The victors: Equinor, a Norwegian company formerly known as Statoil until this past spring; Mayflower Wind, a joint venture owned by Shell and EDP Renewables; and Vineyard Wind, a venture controlled by Spain’s Iberdrola and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners.

RTFA. Maybe someone will read it to the fake president.

Offshore wind turbines keep getting bigger – and cheaper

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Massive offshore wind turbines keep getting bigger, and that’s helping make the power cheaper — to the point where developers say new projects in U.S. waters can compete with natural gas…

Bigger turbines that make more electricity have cut the cost per megawatt by about half, said Tom Harries, a wind analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. That also reduces maintenance expenses and installation time. All of this is helping offshore wind vie with conventional power plants…

“You could not build a thermal gas plant in New England for the price of the wind bids in Massachusetts and Rhode Island,” Martin said Friday at the U.S. Offshore Wind Conference in Boston. “It’s very cost-effective for consumers.”

And even “clean nat gas” will never be as clean as the wind.

Only one Republican from New England may be left in Congress after the November elections

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“I will not be voting for Donald Trump for president” – Senator Susan Collins

New England’s shrinking Republican delegation in Congress is moving toward the brink of political extinction in November with Donald Trump at the top of the party’s ticket…Only four Republicans remain in New England’s 33-member congressional delegation, and three are in competitive races this fall. The other, four-term Senator Susan Collins of Maine, doesn’t face re-election this year.

Republican moderates who once represented the region became a dying breed in the past few decades as the party moved to the right. Trump, with his controversies and bombastic demeanor, has complicated what was already a difficult task of getting re-elected for the region’s party members.

Losses by Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte and Representative Frank Guinta, both of New Hampshire, and Representative Bruce Poliquin of Maine could leave Collins as the only member of her party in Congress from the six New England states: Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Maine and Massachusetts…

Democrats, even before Trump was nominated, were banking on Clinton’s coattails to help them win the Senate and make gains in House seats. Trump’s antics and cratering poll numbers have some Republicans increasingly worried about a rout in November.

Princeton’s Julian Zelizer said there’s a “cushion” of Republican congressional seats in the South to guarantee continued strong presence, even with a loss of some members. But there’s no such cushion in New England for Republican lawmakers.

The Pew Research Center says the combined House delegation of six New England states went from 15 Democrats and 10 Republicans in 1973-74 to 20 Democrats and two Republicans in 2011-2012.

The cradle of the American Revolution was also an important center for every generation’s fight against bigotry, for civil rights. Whether you were an Abolitionist, fighting for Women’s Suffrage, involved with the LGBT struggle for equal opportunity, New England could be counted on for national support.

As one of the centers for education in the nation, contempt for populism and Trump makes rote Republican politics a liability.

Tiny songbirds tracked crossing 1,700 miles of open ocean

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blackpoll warbler by erickson
Click to enlarge — Laura Erickson

A tiny songbird that summers in the forests of northern North America has been tracked on a 1,700-mile, over-the-ocean journey from the northeastern United States and eastern Canada to the Caribbean as part of their winter migration to South America…

Scientists had long suspected that the blackpoll warbler had made its journey to the Caribbean over the ocean, but the study that began in the summer of 2013 when scientists attached tracking devices to the birds was the first time that the flight has been proven, according to results published Wednesday in the United Kingdom in the journal Biology Letters.

“It is such a spectacular, astounding feat that this half-an-ounce bird can make what is obviously a perilous, highly risky journey over the open ocean,” said Chris Rimmer of the Vermont Center for Ecostudies…

The warblers, known to bulk up by eating insects near their coastal departure points before heading south, are common in parts of North America, but their numbers have been declining. “Now maybe that will help us focus attention on what could be driving these declines,” Rimmer said…

A number of bird species fly long distances over water, but the warbler is different because it’s a forest dweller. Most other birds that winter in South America fly through Mexico and Central America.

In the summer of 2013, scientists tagged 19 blackpolls on Vermont’s Mount Mansfield and 18 in two locations in Nova Scotia. Of those, three were recaptured in Vermont with the tracking device attached and two in Nova Scotia.

Four warblers, including two tagged in Vermont, departed between Sept. 25 and Oct. 21 and flew directly to the islands of Hispaniola or Puerto Rico in flights ranging from 49 to 73 hours. A fifth bird departed Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and flew nearly 1,000 miles before landing in the Turks and Caicos before continuing on to South America.

On their return journeys north, the birds flew along the coast.

Though not mentioned in the article, I presume the coastal return leg was governed by food availability. Though it may have been resistance from prevailing winds.

Regardless – what an impressive feat considered quite normal for these wee creatures.

Pic of the Day

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Click to enlarge — Scott Olson/Getty Images

Winter storm stretches from the Midwest through New England into the Canadian Maritimes. This is a lovely photo from Chicago – but I still prefer living where 99% of snow storms drop nothing but pristine powder.

Living here in a valley at 6500′ altitude the snow usually disappears after a few days of brilliant high desert sun. 🙂

Whole Foods decides to sell only sustainable seafood — Trawler operators pissed off!

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Standing on the deck of his rusted steel trawler, Naz Sanfilippo fumed about the latest bad news for New England fishermen: a decision by Whole Foods to stop selling any seafood it does not consider sustainable.

Starting Sunday, gray sole and skate, common catches in the region, will no longer appear in the grocery chain’s artfully arranged fish cases. Atlantic cod, a New England staple, will be sold only if it is not caught by trawlers, which drag nets across the ocean floor, a much-used method here.

“It’s totally maddening,” Mr. Sanfilippo said. “They’re just doing it to make all the green people happy…”

Mr. Sanfilippo is full of crap! Ask folks who grew up subsistence fishing in New England – as I did. Or the fisherman with a small family boat line fishing? We all hated the damn trawlers, what they did to the fishing grounds, their indiscriminate bottom scraping.

Whole Foods says that, in fact, it is doing its part to address the very real problem of overfishing and help badly depleted fish stocks recover. It is using ratings set by the Blue Ocean Institute, a conservation group, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. They are based on factors including how abundant a species is, how quickly it reproduces and whether the catch method damages its habitat.

“Stewardship of the ocean is so important to our customers and to us,” said David Pilat, the global seafood buyer for Whole Foods. “We’re not necessarily here to tell fishermen how to fish, but on a species like Atlantic cod, we are out there actively saying, ‘For Whole Foods Market to buy your cod, the rating has to be favorable.’ ”

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Rhode Island rounds out Northeast USA with civil rights for all

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Less than a week after New York became the nation’s sixth state to legalize same-sex marriage, Rhode Island state lawmakers on Wednesday voted in favor of a bill that permits civil unions between gay and lesbian couples.

The measure, which passed the state Senate by a count of 21-16, is widely seen as a compromise intended to provide same-sex couples with added rights and benefits, while also preventing an expanded legal definition of marriage.

Gov. Lincoln Chafee, an independent, is expected to sign the bill into law, according to his spokesman, Michael Trainor.

…The law would take effect on July 1, making Rhode Island the fifth state in the union to allow civil unions between same-sex couples. Such unions are currently permitted in New Jersey and Illinois, and will be allowed in Delaware and Hawaii beginning January 1, 2012. Three West Coast states — California, Oregon and Washington — plus Nevada, also allow for “comprehensive domestic partnerships,” largely considered an equivalent to their civil union counterparts…

The legislation, which passed overwhelmingly in the state’s lower house on May 19, affords same-sex couples a host of new state tax breaks, health-care benefits and greater ease of inheritance…

The usual clot of religious nutballs and homophobes threw up their hands in a collective whine after passage.

There is a chance the law will have a sticking point over the predictable group of riders supposedly designed to protect religion-based institutions from lawsuit. This often extends all the way to defending hospitals owned by religious groups who refuse decision-making on medical services to civil union partners.

This may not seem like a big problem for our urban-dwelling readers; but, here in Santa Fe County the only for-real hospital is owned by flunkies for the Catholic Church. They’ve already removed a number of procedures formerly allowed – on the basis of ideology and superstition.