Some Sound News

Some people who have boats in Greenwich don't like ospreys nesting near them. I would have liked this story better if it had included some reaction from Audubon Greenwich or Audubon Connecticut.

Fresh from the winning referendum on whether Stratford should sell Long Beach West to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the city (or is it a town?) signed a deal with the Trust for Public Land to serve as intermediary. This story doesn't say how much TPL will make on the deal though.

And some people in Connecticut want to keep the lobster v-notch program going, here and here.

Ever Seen a Mountain Lion? These People Think They Have

One story that never goes away, for people interested in wildlife, is whether there are mountain lions in the northeast. The official answer is no. And yet there's been an intermittent but endless stream of articles about mountain lion sightings. The best of these is Edward Hoagland's great essay, "Hailing the Elusory Mountain Lion," but I remember reading a good piece in Audubon magazine about 25 years ago, too, and others since.

Yesterday my former colleague Mike Risinit had a good story in the Journal News. What jumped out at me was the number of people who said they had seen mountain lions in eastern Putnam and Dutchess counties, along Route 22, near the Connecticut border. Here are some excerpts from Mike's story and from the online comments about it:

... a Patterson family spotted a possible mountain lion in their Somerset Drive yard.

Nicole Rubin, the Patterson mother who said last month that she saw a mountain lion, said several neighbors reached out after seeing The Journal News article about her feline sighting and shared similar stories. John Prophet of Patterson, who lives a mile away from Rubin, said he saw a mountain lion - "big head, big body, long, long tail - in his yard about five years ago....

Christine Belcher, who lives in Dutchess County, said she was driving near her home last month and had to stop her Honda CR-V to let three mountain lions cross Dover Furnace Road.

"It was like a momma and a couple of smaller ones with a long tail, a flat face and big ears," she said, recalling the animals that were so close she could see their whiskers. "In my mind, I called it a mountain lion."

... I'm sure i saw a mountain lion a year and a half ago on rt.22 just north of wingdale. it was about 75 yards ahead of me running across 22. I distinctly remember that long thick tail and tight fur, it wasn't a dog and wasn't a bobcat....

... I previously posted that I saw a mountain lion this year in Dutchess CO. and after talking to family and neighbors, I have learned that there has been several sightings in the past. One sighting was a road kill. The same person who saw this had one run across Rt.22 in the same area several weeks later....

That area is not exactly wilderness but it is the heart of the 6,000-acre Great Swamp and it's close enough to the Taconic Ridge, the Berkshire Mountains and the Highlands so that I suppose it's not implausible that some mountain lions are holed up there, or at least pass through with some regularity.

Mike's story includes a photo that someone submitted purporting to be a mountain lion in Columbia County. I wish he had said when it was taken and by whom. (Thursday a.m.: Mike told me yesterday that the shot was taken by the brother of a colleague of his, using one of those cameras that are triggered when wildlife moves into its path.)

The Last Green Valley

I guess it depends on what you mean by "significant," but an organization called The Last Green Valley, based in Danielson, Connecticut, says the 1,085-square-mile watershed of the Quinebaug and Shetucket rivers (which flow into the Thames and then Long Island Sound) is "the only significant stretch of rural and forest land between Boston and Washington, D.C."

Actually it was Judy Benson of the New London Day who made that claim, in this story, but the information on the group's website, here, makes a pretty good case for it being true. They've got a terrific-sounding consciousness-raising program scheduled to start next spring:

”Source to Sea” will take place from April through June throughout the 35-town region and extend southward into the New London County towns that flank the Thames, which is formed by the convergence of the Quinebaug and Shetucket in Norwich and is one of the three major rivers that feeds Long Island Sound.

The Long Island Otters

We have three small rivers in our town that flow into Long Island Sound -- the Mianus, the Mill and the Rippowam (which joins the Mill somewhere in Stamford) -- and in all of them river otters are not uncommon. You have to be lucky to see one, but a lot of people are lucky and have reported sightings.

It turns out that on Long Island river otters are far less common -- in fact a researcher quoted in this story estimates that there might be only a dozen or so on the whole island. But they seem to be breeding near Oyster Bay, in Nassau County, which is amazing:

Michael J. Bottini, a wildlife biologist from Springs, said a survey of likely otter habitats he carried out across Long Island last winter found unmistakable signs of a female and several pups living in and around the 60-acre Shu Swamp nature preserve in the Village of Mill Neck in Oyster Bay.

The signs were the distinctive fish scale-riddled droppings otters leave in waterside latrines that signal one another of their comings and goings.

Mr. Bottini, who heads the Long Island River Otter Project, theorizes that small numbers of otters may be picking their way along water routes from relatively otter-rich Connecticut and Westchester across western Long Island Sound to Nassau’s North Shore, and fanning out from there....

Following the otters’ logical route eastward, Mr. Bottini found signs in a Nissequogue River lagoon in Sunken Meadow State Park; by a pond in Smithtown’s Blydenburgh Park; on a tributary of the Peconic River in Southampton; in the Nature Conservancy's Mashomack Preserve on Shelter Island; and, following up a tip of a reported otter sighting, along the Forge River in Brookhaven.

A New Long Island Sound Blog

A fellow Matthew Houskeeper, who lives in Connecticut, has started a new blog about Long Island Sound and is making an effort to get out and visit places, and to write about them (in contrast to me: I make an effort to glance at my "Long Island Sound" Google alerts when they come in).

The blog is called Soundbounder, and if you click here you can read about his visit to Larchmont's Manor Park, a truly beautiful place.

From Australia: A Link Between Salps and Climate Change?

On Block Island last August, the beaches were rimmed with sparkling lines of translucent salps -- tiny planktonic vertebrates -- in numbers that few people there had ever seen before. Now there's speculation out of Australia that salps "could be part of the planet's mechanism for combating global warming."

The jellyfish-like animals are known as salps and their main food is phytoplankton (marine algae) which absorbs the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the top level of the ocean. This in turn comes from the atmosphere. ...

By eating the algae, the salps turn the algae and their carbon dioxide into faeces which drops to the ocean floor. They also take carbon to the floor with them when they die after a life cycle as short as only a couple of weeks.

This is thought to be a natural form of carbon sequestration similar to what scientists are trying to do with carbon capture from emission sources such as power stations.

This story also offers an explanation about why they can be so numerous:

"They are interesting because they are the fastest reproducing multi-celled animal on the planet and can double their numbers several times a day."

Not-So-Idle Thoughts About Westchester's New No-Idling Law

It will soon be illegal in Westchester County to let your car idle for more than three minutes. Local cops and county police will enforce the law, which carries a $250 fine.

How a cop will know whether your car has been idling for three minutes is a mystery.

A more important mystery, though, is: why three minutes? The Consumer Energy Center recommends that you turn off your ar if you're going to be idling for more than 10 seconds (or 30 seconds, depending on which sentence on this page you prefer). Here's the reasoning:

For every two minutes a car is idling, it uses about the same amount of fuel it takes to go about one mile. Research indicates that the average person idles their car five to 10 minutes a day. People usually idle their cars more in the winter than in the summer. But even in winter, you don't need to let your car sit and idle for five minutes to "warm it up" when 30 seconds will do just fine.

But you're not going anywhere. Idling gets ZERO miles per gallon.

The recommendation is: If you are going to be parked for more than 30 seconds, turn off the engine. Ten seconds of idling can use more fuel than turning off the engine and restarting it.

A columnist for Slate magazine agrees -- if you're going to be idling for more than 10 seconds, turn off your car.

I'm glad Westchester County is passing the new idling law. But it could have been a bit tougher, no?

A Sewage Fix on the Hudson Gives Researchers Immediate Data

When a sewage treatment plant needs to be fixed, the operators can't just shut off the flow of sewage into the plant. They have to plan the repairs for a time of low-flow (very late at night or very early in the morning), disinfest the sewage as best they can, continue to release it partially-treated, and hope for the best.

When Westchester County announced recently that it had to do just that, three researchers took it as an opportunity to get real data. Here's what the Journal News reported (although oddly it doesn't say which treatment plant the repairs were made at; the count has three on the Hudson: in Yonkers, Ossining and Peekskill):

Just hours after the predawn release, the three testers found levels of the sewage-indicating enterococcus bacteria that were four times higher than usual.

The highest levels recorded exceeded recommended federal guidelines for primary exposure, such as swimming.

Though the scientists' overnight data showed bacterial spikes, the levels receded within 24 hours, as expected. ...

"There have been dramatic improvements in the water quality of the Hudson River since the (1972) Clean Water Act," said Juhl, a research scientist with Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades. "But the current data sets consist of averages. People don't go into the average water on an average day. They go in at specific locations at specific times."

Out of 27 spots that Juhl and the crew tested repeatedly in 2006 and 2007, 21 had at least one instance when enterococcus levels per 100 milliliters of liquid were higher than allowed by federal authorities for anyone with direct contact with the water, such as swimmers.

The bad news is that the repair crews didn't finish the work and will have to try again. The good news is that there aren't likely to be many swimmers in the water at this time of year.

The Rich Are Different

What is it with rich people and their sense of entitlement? On eastern Long Island, a financier named Ronald Baron had a 100-foot-long, 30-foot-high sand dune excavated and removed from his property. His attorney called it a "pile fo dirt" but the town of East Hampton's director of natural resources begged to differ. The pile of dirt, according to Newsday

... was in fact a 3,000-year-old "fossil dune," which requires a natural resources special permit to be changed in any way.

"He can't touch that dune without a permit," Penny said Saturday, noting it is part of a 3.5-mile secondary dune that runs through oceanfront East Hampton. "It was one of the first dunes to form in the double dunes area when that [sand] material came on shore 3,000 years ago," he said.

And yesterday while sitting in a waiting rom, I saw a Wall Street Journal story about Dirk Ziff, an heir to the Ziff publishing fortune, whose employees thought it was OK to take trees and shrubs from nearby nature preserves to landscape their boss's property on Martha's Vineyard.

The Snowy Owl at Calf Pasture Beach in Norwalk

I drove to Calf Pasture Beach in Norwalk yesterday morning to see if I could find the snowy owl that had been there for four or five days. I had never seen a snowy owl and, in the days when I was more interested in birding than I am now, I used to imagine that finding one would be the culmination of a great effort, rising at dawn, a tramp along a cold beach and marsh, tedious minutes scrutinizing the horizon through my binoculars, and finally seeing the snowy owl, ghost-like, stopping only briefly after flying down from the tundra in search of food.

Yesterday I pulled into a parking space facing the water and a jetty and immediately saw something white, almost like a large white football, within easy view of the car. I couldn't believe it might be the owl. I reached into the back seat and got my binoculars. Even through the windshield it was like looking at a snowy owl in a field guide.

There were 10 or so people with scopes and binoculars further along a path that ran along the water (in the photo above, the owl is just to the left of and beyond the sign, which says "Keep Off Rocks"). I walked down and stood near a woman with a scope. The owl was maybe 30 yards away. I told her I had had no idea it would be so close, and she said neither did anybody else -- on previous days it had been farther away. She let me look through her scope. Arcs of dark feathers formed parabolas across its breast, and there was a crown of brown feathers along its forehead.

I looked at it from several perspectives along the walk and shot some pictures with my little digital. The bird opened its eyes and closed them, and turned its head. At one point it flew about five feet, from one rock to another. The wind blew softly off the water, wet and cool. One woman was bundled up in a winter coat and hat; nearby a young man wore a tee short. The stretches of water in between the Norwalk Islands were quiet. I could see only one oyster boat working. People stolled strolled by and asked what was up. They all brightened when they were shown the owl.