Two photos

I see that a building I've always admired on Chestnut St. is up for auction.  Unfortunately it's squeezed between the expansions of Mercy Hospital and Baystate Medical Center and is probably considered prime real estate.  Can it survive ?

 

 Sasha enjoying a bitter cold but sunny morning on the porch.

Music composed by and for Nora the cat

This is not what I expected when I watched this video. Do yourself a favor and don't watch it until you've got a whole five minutes to listen. Here's a link to Catcerto, that tells how the piece came to be composed.

Don't silence their voices - ban devocalization in Massachusetts

Massachusetts resident? On Monday, pick up the phone and call your state legislator. (Don't know your legislator? You can look it up here.) Tell him or her that you support An Act to Prohibit Devocalization of Cats and Dogs. There will be a hearing on the bill on Monday, July 14, with a full vote to follow sometimes this legislative session.

Who would oppose this law? Unethical dog breeders and fighters and animal hoarders who fear animal noises would give them away.

The effort to produce this bill all started with a 15 year old Care2 member and Massachusetts resident Jordan Star. You can find out more about this legislation and why it's needed at Care2.

Photo from Tony the Bald Eagle's site on Flickr.

Cats, jobs, music, gardens

The cats broke into my room quite early this morning, bringing an end to my plans to sleep in. Maybe it's just as well. I have to finish a grant for Arise this weekend. More than anything, I'd like to be outside working in the garden, but most of that will have to wait for my next unemployment check and a solid block of time.

Last night I went up to the annual May Day event organized by Western Mass. Jobs with Justice which this year took place at the Campus Center Auditorium at UMass. Funny, I've always supported unions but never been in one!-- never any union at the places I've worked.

The speaker this year was long-time community and labor organizer Stewart Acuff. In his speech, he laid the moral and economic foundation for the Employee Free Choice Act, which strengthens the right of workers to unionize.

We gather on this May Day of 2009 at a time of great hope and great promise and a time of great challenge.

How we meet the challenges and opportunities which we face all around us will determine the near term future of our country, the quality of life for our kids and grandkids and possibly even the world.

Though some of us may have been divided in the past, we no longer have the luxury of division.
Workers, trade unionist, advocates and organizers of the poor and immigrants, environmentalists, feminists, LGBT activist, clergy and people of faith, community leaders, seekers of peace and warriors for justice, our individual destiny is bound up in our common destiny.

So we are bound by our common destiny, but we are bound even more tightly by our common values. You see, my brothers and sisters, we believers in justice and progress are bound by the fundamental thread of humanity - as old as the human species and the human spirit.

The Huffington Post has published his entire speech.

As usual, music was a big part of the celebration. Western Mass. is blessed with talent. Tom Neilson, Red Valley Fog, Verne McArthur, Jay Mankita and Jose Ayerve all performed, as well as the WMA contingent of the Raging Grannies.

I'm not on the inside of this, but it seems to be union organizing is ready to make the biggest gains in years.

11 a.m. and a quick glance out the kitchen window: I think my strawberries are flowering and I'm going to go look.

chat chasse pigeon

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRcVIQiXuzM

Cats that know what they want and how to get it

I have more serious things to blog about today, so let me share this first:



Link: YouTube

I haven't forgotten

Yes, I still care about my blog and my readers, but since I've gotten out of the hospital I've been so far behind in everything else-- my job, Arise, and my personal responsibilities-- that I haven't been able to build up the momentum to post. Now I am off on vacation, and what with arranging house sitting, cat care, etc., I'll be lucky to leave the house on time.

Looks like one of my cats will be coming with me. Right this second he's at the vet's, where he's been since Wednesday with a blocked ureter. Assuming he is well enough to leave (which he probably is, but I'll find out within the hour), he will have to come with me because I can't expect my housesitter to recognize if he is getting sick again.

Ah, Wellfleet. Some people go on vacation for adventure, but I go to relax, and once I'm at the Atlantic Ocean, I feel like I've been there forever.

My sister and I are splitting the cost of a laptop, and the Wellfleet Library has wireless, so I hope to post while I'm away.

I still care about: homeless people, poverty, the fate of our environment, food and hunger, and the wellbeing of my home community, Springfield, MA-- and, of course, my children, granddaughter, friends, animals and poetry!

Talk to you soon.

Olympic Misadventures: Cats Rescued, People Displaced

Reuters reports that more than 160 feral cats have been rescued from a London site that will be the home of the 1012 Summer Olympics.

Meanwhile, David Eby of the Pivot Legal Society in Vancouver, British Columbia, writes about a friend of his, Darrell Mickasko, who has died from burns received when a gas heater he was using to keep warm behind a dumpster ignited his sleeping bag. Vancouver is hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics.

I saw Darrell last week when he asked if I knew of anywhere he could rent. I didn't. Now he's dead, and the cause is indisputibly homelessness.

The public needs to know why, in Vancouver, people are burning to death trying to keep warm on our streets. Darrell's family, in Edmonton, needs to know why he died.

Last November, Pivot Legal Society said homelessness could triple in Vancouver by the time of the Olympics unless something is done. 1,200 people sleep on the streets in Vancouver on any given night. More than 400 units of affordable housing were lost in the city the year before.

Over at YouTube, China's Olympic Lie talks about the impact of the coming 2008 Olympics on poor people and the environment.

Graphic from a Flicker group on feral cats. Check it out.

Coyotes and fishers and moose (Oh my)

Stan Freeman at the Springfield Republican wrote an interesting story this week about how our Eastern coyotes are actually a genetic blend of Western coyote and Eastern wolf!

Wildlife has been returning to Massachusetts in a big way. I remember a few years ago, as I was driving up Bay St., I saw a magnificent, fully antlered deer standing just behind the wrought iron fence at Oak Grove Cemetery. I called the groundskeeper when I got to work and he was well aware of the buck and was making his own calls to various state agencies for guidance.

Fishers are back, too. The largest member of the weasel family, their reputation as cat killers is probably well-deserved. I lived in Maine for about five years in the early 70's, where fishers had an almost mythical character. I saw one once, streaking across a back road at twilight. My hair stood on end. They were reintroduced in Massachusetts in the 1950's by the logging industry because they are one of the porcupine's only predators.

Thanks to the reforestation of Massachusetts, even moose are returning.. We now have a population of about 1,000 established in just 25 years, according to Stephen DeStephano, research professor at UMass, Amherst.

I've often thought about how amazing it is that Massachusetts is more forested now than a hundred years ago. Our forests started their road to recovery during the Gold Rush of 1849 and took another step forward during the Civil War, when many returning soldiers abandoned farming entirely. Then, in the 1930's, Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC) put 10,000 men and boys to work in our forests. You can read more about Massachusett's history of forest conservation at MA's Department of Conservation and Recreation. Why don't we do something like this again?

One sad note in this picture is that the increase in forest cover equals the decline in local agricultural production. But that's another story.

Graphic from David Foster; 'Wildlands and Woodlands: A Vision for the Forests of Massachusetts" Harvard Forest, Harvard University, 2006/

Phrases I have probably said more than 10,000 times in my life:

Hey, how are you?
Thanks so much.
Okey-Dokey.
Get down, cat.

Bats in the house

I have just combed the Internet looking for pictures of cute bats and let me tell you, they're not easy to find. I recognize that an unpleasant childhood experience and too many Dracula movies have shaped my perception. Surely baby bats are cute to their mothers?

I've had a bat in my apartment every night for a week-- a different bat each night, I think: one was VERY BIG and flew high; one was smaller and flew in the middle range, then another big one, then another small one, et cetera et cetera.

The first night I laughed at myself as I crawled on my hands and knees from the living room to the kitchen to open the porch screen door so the bat could get out, which eventually it did.

The second night I slunk along the walls to repeat the process.

By tonight, I'm, like, Gosh, it's hard to relax with a bat in the house. I actually walked to the porch door to open it.

My cats have been unsurprisingly useless, in fact only mildly interested in the whole bat affair.

I know bats are good for the environment-- they eat tons of bugs-- and they're mammals, they nurse their babies, they're not aggressive and some species are endangered.

Still, I'd rather not have them in the house, but from what I've researched, it's pointless to try to find where they are nesting in the house and seal them in because they have babies and they would die inside the walls and not smell very good. It has to be done between November 15 and March 15. I will try to do it before the holidays. I don't expect my growing (and possibly temporary) sang-froid will extend to my company.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Two hours later: I'm talking to my friend and fellow Sagittarian Holly on the phone.
"By the way, do you know anything about bats?" I said.
"Bats! I had a frigging bat in my house for three days," she said. "I was starting to think I'd just have to outlive it."

Putting the tomatoes in, saving (maybe) a starling

Once I read a sentence in a National Geographic article about color that said: "In New England, they call it 'the color.'" No, we don't, I thought, no idea what the article was talking about. A few months later, in October, I found myself saying to a friend, "The color isn't supposed to be very good this year-- too dry a summer." Context is everything.

Well, in New England we "put in" our tomatoes, peppers and other vegetables, and that's what I did this Saturday and Sunday-- a bit late in the season but not too late. Most of the stores had put away their seeds but I managed to find string beans and bought plants for everything else. Sunny, dry, hot, breezy: a perfect weekend to be outside.

Today as I stepped outside my office door to go home, I found a bewildered baby bird sitting on the pavement. It was not one of those thumb-sized, almost embryonic babies that you always find already dead, yet it was not fully feathered enough to be a fledgling-- needed a bit more growing. There's a starling's nest in the overhang outside my office and I've been following the parents' progress in and out and the cheeps of at least one baby for some months. Clearly that's where it came from.

Could I put it back myself? The baby opened its yellow mouth and looked at me. I went and got a chair, but I was about two feet too short. I went back into the building to look for someone taller than myself. There was one guy, but he said,"Oh, no, you can't touch them, the parents will reject them." He was busy and didn't want to be bothered. Back in my office I called the Audubon Society in Lincoln to ask: Is this true, or a myth? A myth, the naturalist said. And if I find this bird back on my sidewalk tomorrow, what would I feed it? I can't tell you that, she said, because it's illegal to keep a wild animal. You'd have to look it up on the Internet.

No ladder in the building, but suddenly I realized that if I moved my car under the overhang, and climbed up on it, I could reach the nest. So I moved the car, and gave it a trial climb first-- yes, I could reach. Back on the ground, I picked up the bird with some trepidation-- would it struggle?-- but the baby was calmer than I was. I put it back in its nest and told it to be good and that I didn't want to see it back on the pavement tomorrow.

I know that anything can happen, but the life of a bird feels especially precious right now.

25.5 million birds are missing in this country, according to a new Audubon Society report. Some 20 species have declined by an average of 68%. "Forty years ago, there were an estimated 31 million bobwhites. Now there are 5.5 million," Verlyn Klinkenborg reports in a poignant, must read editorial in the New York Times, Millions of Missing Birds, Vanishing in Plain Sight.

While the reasons for declining bird populations are complex, I want to mention two because they are both within our control to change in the short term.

100 to 900 million birds are killed each year in this country because of collisions with glass, mostly because they are disoriented by and fly into lighted windows. Given the urgent need to reduce our energy consumption, getting buildings to turn off their lights at night only makes sense.

At least 100 million birds a year are killed by cats. In Wisconsin alone, cats killed 7 million birds last year.

I know many cat owners (and I used to be one of them) who let their cats outside and say that it's just part of the circle of life when their cats kill birds. I want to say, Please think again. With 60 million feral cats in this country, birds don't need any additional predators.

While my friend Holly encounters a bear and three cubs in her back yard (she lives in Northampton), and it scarcely seems unusual these days, little lives disappear around us and we don't notice. When was the last time you found a toad in your back yard? Or saw a butterfly other than a Monarch, although even those are in decline? And birds? An absence of movement in the air, an absence of shadows that fall on you in the garden, a silence.

Self-Taught

Yesterday I had to go to Boston by bus and back. Early in the morning I saw:

• Four hawks
  Geese and ducks
  spring water falling from rocks
  A coyote moving like ginger
  through a yellow marsh

On the way home I started the Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra for the third time and found it much easier going. Guess my consumption of popular physics is paying off. I finally understood that it is my mass, curving the space/time continuum, which is responsible for cats falling into my lap and draping themselves in an orbit around my desk.

Intoxicants

Woke up to
nails scattered on the floor:
catnip liberated from its secret drawer:
Jets and Sharks flick their tails
from chairs and windowsills

Speaking of intoxicants: I heard Ethan Nadelmann from the Drug Policy Alliance on National Public Radio a week or so ago. He was commenting that what elected officials and policy makers say behind closed doors about decriminalization and medicalization of marijuana is very different from what they feel they can say publicly.

An estimated $4 billion is spent annually on the arrest, prosecution and incarceration of marijuana offenders.

For one law officer’s take on the War on Drugs, check out former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper’s book Breaking Ranks.