Which Carnivore Is The Most Successful Hunter?

 We all know the basics of the food chain. Plants use sunlight, water, and soil to grow. Herbivores are the myriad animals that eat plants. And carnivores are the animals that eat other animals.

We focus a lot on the big, magnificent carnivores, from lions and tigers to grizzly bears to great white sharks to killer whales.

What doesn't get mentioned much, however, is that most of those carnivores don't have high rates of hunting success. When lions go after a meal, their success rate is reportedly as low as 10%. Same for many other carnivores, such as wolves. 

That might explain why carnivores regularly take the easy route and steal kills from other carnivores. Grizzly bears take food that wolves kill. Bald eagles steal fish that were caught by ospreys. Lions steal the kills of several animals, including those of the African wild dog, 50-pound predators that hunt in packs and live in the southern parts of Africa.

Wait a minute. 500-pound lions rely on prey that was taken down by 50-pound wild dogs?

Yup. It turns out that African Wild Dogs - a distant relative of domesticated dogs - are very intelligent and have a highly complex social structure. They do everything cooperatively, including coordinating their hunting activity. 

While wolves commonly hunt in packs of 4 to 6, African Wild Dogs hunt in packs of 20 or more. They have a sophisticated hunting strategy and they communicate among each other during the hunt. 

As a result, their hunting success rate is 80%, one of the highest success rates in the animal kingdom.

Enjoy the beauty and smarts of these animals, because it's estimated that they will be extinct in the not-too-distant future. Why? Because, like so many carnivores, they require lots of uninterrupted territory. And that territory is being fragmented by human development.

You can read more about these wild dogs here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_wild_dog

People Who Feed Wildlife...

 A 500-pound black bear on Tahoe's South Shore has been sentenced to death because it has broken into numerous homes, including homes that had people in them.

Why has this bear become such a nuisance? Because it became habituated to human-supplied food. This can happen because the bear found dumpsters and garbage cans to raid. But it's also likely that humans simply fed it out of misguided notions.

All locals have heard stories of "the guy down the street" who puts out dog food for the bears. Maybe he wants to take photos of the bears up close. Or maybe, like one person we know, he just "loves seeing bears so much."

As a result, many homes and cabins have been damaged, and some have been destroyed by bears who are looking for food in the fridge.

All the love for bears comes from a good place, but it puts the Forest Service in a very bad place. They made the difficult decision to put the bear down to eliminate any further danger to people.

The attraction of wildlife stems largely from the fact that it is wild. Feed it, and it is no longer wild.

When your vacation home or car is ruined, thank the people who fed the bear and taught it that houses and cars are the best place to find food.

Let's learn to love wildlife in the wild. Take your camera on photo-hunting trips. Don't set it up on a tripod next to the dog food in your open garage.

New South Tahoe Event Center

 Locals have noticed a large building being built in Stateline (South Shore) near the Mont Bleu hotel.

It is being put together by the Douglas County Vistor Authority. (Douglas County is one of 5 Tahoe counties and is on the south, Nevada side of the Tahoe Basin and extends down to Carson Valley.) It's designed to be a place where businesses can book concerts, conventions, trade shows and such. (The main entertain venue will seat 6000 people) Construction completion is scheduled for the end of 2022. Bookings are said to begin in 2023. 

It promises to be a nice addition to the business community and will presumably employ many people. 

Where those workers will come from is another story, as we don't have nearly enough affordable housing. Probably, they will commute up to the basin from Carson Valley (Minden, Gardnerville, etc.)

Check out the design:

Here's the website link for more information:

https://tahoedouglasva.org/events-center/

18 Tahoe Truckee Reno Athletes At Beijing Olympics!

 We have a surfeit of Olympic athletes from our area. 

Tahoe-area thletes who are currently competing at the Winter Olympics in China are:

David Wise

Luke Winters

Brita Sigourney

JC Schoonmaker

Alice Robinson

Katie Parker

Nina O'Brien

Louis Muhlen-Schulte

Michel Macedo

Maureen "Mo" Lebel

Cody Laplante

AJ Hurt

Hannah Halvorsen

Eileen Gu

Travis Ganong

Keely Cashman

Bryce Bennett

Jamie Anderson

Congrats to these great athletes!

Sweet Story Is Antidote To Constant Dark News

Writers are always thinking about how stories work. Here's a real-life story that caught my attention.

Three years ago in Maryland, an 11-year-old boy was fishing with his buddy, who happened to be about five decades older. They were in coastal waters and found a floating bottle with $2 and a message in it. The message said, 'Pass it on.'

The boy wrote a different message and sent the bottle on a new trip by dropping it back into the Atlantic Ocean. That was in 2019.

Some time later, the boy's buddy died.

A few weeks ago, the bottle turned up on the coast of Ireland, 3200 miles away.

The people who found the bottle in Ireland had to do some detective work on Facebook to find the father of the boy who dropped the bottle into the ocean.

Now the boy and his family are going to travel to Ireland to see the beach where the bottle turned up. It'll be a fun trip and a fine way to remember the boy's older fishing friend.

Here's a link to the story: 

https://patch.com/maryland/annapolis/message-bottle-travels-3-200-miles-helps-boy-cope-loss

New Luxury Tahoe Condos

I'm not sure what to think about this, in a time when Tahoe badly needs more affordable housing. But never mind that for a moment.

It wasn't that many years ago when $1 million would get you a house on the shore of Lake Tahoe. 

Okay, it was a long time ago. But definitely within the range of my memory. (I've been here 31 years.)

Now a lakeshore house costs $10 - $60 million depending on whether you want an old-time, tiny cottage or a nice spread on a sizable lot.

A condo developer has gotten approval for 40 new condos in Incline Village. They aren't houses. They aren't on the lake. They don't have a lake view. The proposed building, while nice, is still just a glorified apartment building. The condos, while very nice, are still just upscale apartments, with people on the other side of the walls, perhaps above your ceiling or below your floor. 

Of course, there are lots of amenities, such as a condo association to take care of the grounds, no small thing when you live or vacation in a place with ten or twenty feet of snow.

The price? $2.5 million for a smallish unit (1,500 square feet) to $7 million for a large unit (4,000+ square feet). Modern Tahoe prices are something to behold, even if they're not like Nob Hill in The City or those in Manhattan.

They will probably sell out soon.

The place does have a nice view from the roof.

Here's the website: https://nine47tahoe.com/

Bald Eagles Soar (And Indicate Environmental Health)

 Back when the Bald Eagle was chosen as our national symbol (Ben Franklin wanted it to be the wild turkey), they were nearly everywhere in the country. 

Bald Eagles always stood out as huge, majestic, gorgeous birds, (up to 14 pounds and an 8-foot wingspan) who patrolled our waterways looking for fish to eat. (Never mind for the moment that one of the eagle's main approaches to obtaining food was to steal it from Ospreys after they'd done the hard work of catching the fish!)

When DDT was first invented in the late 19th century, it became a popular insecticide. As is typical, no one paid much attention at first to potential side effects. Unfortunately, DDT was responsible for decimating bird populations. Bald Eagles were among many species that nearly went extinct. (Not to mention that mosquitos had developed significant resistance to the poison!)

After much argument and hostility toward environmentalists, DDT was eventually banned in 1972. (Why is it always so hard to protect the environment?)

By the time DDT was banned, Bald Eagles had been killed in such great numbers, their survival was touch-and-go.

The first time anyone paid attention to Bald Eagles in the Tahoe Basin, there were only a couple of them.

Fast forward several decades and their numbers began climbing. In 2017, the Tahoe raptor count showed 27 Bald Eagles. In 2021, 42 Bald Eagles! 

Our beautfiful national bird is back. Everyone who spends much time hiking in Tahoe has seen them. 

Hurrah for the eagles!

Russ, the Pit Bull, An Incredible Dog Story

Paula Peterson, writing for South Tahoe Now dot com, reported the story of Russ, a black, three-year-old Pit Bull from Riverside County. His owner was on a short-term job in South Lake Tahoe back in August. Russ got lost two days before the Caldor Fire forced the town to evacuate.

Russ's owner filed a lost-dog report but then had to leave town without him. Talk about heart-wrenching.

Four months later, we had the huge storms. A snowboarder and skier saw Russ in a tree well on the side of Twin Peaks, the small mountains just across Highway 50 from the airport. Russ was trapped, unable to move. They contacted Tahoe PAWS, a group that searches for lost pets. Multiple people were involved in the dramatic rescue with dog and humans being taken down the mountain on a sled.

Russ survived and was reunited with his owner.

How Russ survived on his own for many months is a mystery. He must be incredibly tough to have found food and shelter. When the snow got too deep, he was lucky that some back-country skiers found him.

Here's the link to the story: 

https://southtahoenow.com/story/01/06/2022/dog-missing-caldor-fire-evacuations-rescued-snowy-south-lake-tahoe-mountainside

The Next Big Space Telescope Meets Tahoe Mysteries... Sort Of

 In Tahoe Payback, there is a discussion of the Italian mathematician Giuseppe Lagrange a man who - in the 1700s, 200 years before the first satellite was launched into orbit - figured out a solution to the "three-body problem" for how the sun, Earth, and the moon relate in their orbits. Lagrange did this with nothing but mathematics. No fancy telescopes, no computers, just him and his chalkboard. Amazing what mathematicians can figure out!

One result of his work was the realization that with any two big objects in space - Earth and the sun - there will be five points in space where the gravity of the different bodies and the centrifugal force from hurtling around the sun, cancel each other out. Lagrange realized that these five points - now called Lagrangian points - are like gravity wells. Objects like asteroids that wander by may fall into these "wells" and be trapped. Another perspective suggests that we could purposely put spacecraft into those points, and the spacecraft would tend to stay in place without much encouragement.

On Christmas day, we launched the James Webb telescope. The James Webb telescope will be much more powerful than the Hubble telescope. 

The mirror of the James Webb telescope is made up of gold-plated hexagonal sections. Once the rocket lifted the telescope into space, the mirrored sections were automatically assembled. Together the combined pieces are 21 feet across. That mirror is many times bigger than the 7-foot mirror of the Hubble telescope. It will allow astronomers to see stuff they've only dreamed of.

When they looked for a good place to put it in orbit, they chose the L-2  Lagrange point, about a million miles out from our planet. In the illustration below, Earth is the blue dot, the Sun is the yellow dot, and the Lagrange points are numbered.

What does this have to do with my Tahoe mysteries?

Not much other than Tahoe Payback has a character who is into Lagrangian points. While not hugely critical to the mystery, the concept of places in space where you can "park" a spacecraft is something I find very cool. (Incidentally, the Lagrangian points at the planet Jupiter are so big and their gravity so powerful, that they hold a million asteroids and other space detritus.)

Last we heard, the James Webb telescope has assembled its mirror pieces, unfurled its solar panels, and its huge sunshade. It is now cruising out to its million-mile distance. It will take a few weeks to get there, then it will begin to go to work.

As with the Hubble telescope, we will hopefully be hearing about "James Webb telescope" discoveries for years to come.

Up To TWELVE Feet Of Snow... !!!

I'm writing this on Christmas Eve.

The weather forecast shows storm after storm, lined up out in the Pacific, waiting to get into California like the backlog of cargo ships waiting to get into Long Beach. 

The storms will push across the coast and the Central Valley and then climb up the West Slope of the Sierra. Most scenarios show 5 or 6 feet coming to Tahoe by this coming Tuesday. And they added this killer line from the National Weather Service: 

"Travel will be difficult to impossible this weekend with snow levels lowering into the foothils Sunday morning. Tree branches could fall as well. Additional snow accumulations of 3 to 6 feet, with localized amounts of up to 12 feet."

Either way, the result will be a substantial addition to our snowpack, another dent in the drought, and multiple feet of water added to Lake Tahoe and Northern California reservoirs. 

In 2017 (was that the correct year?), they said the drought that year would take years of above-average precipitation to recover from. But after a series of major storms. we bounced back to normal in just one season.

This year they've been saying the same thing. Will these storms do the same thing and refill the lake? Check back in April.

P.S. A reminder that TAHOE JADE will be free on Kindle through December 29th. Here's the link:

https://www.amazon.com/Tahoe-Jade-McKenna-Mystery-Thriller-ebook/dp/B092NKYLF7/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1640228789&sr=1-1

Check it out, and tell your friends. I think you'll like it.

 

Tahoe Jade Free On Kindle

Next Saturday is Christmas.

In celebration, Tahoe Jade will be free to download from December 25th through December 29th. If it's not in your Kindle, you can add it for free. Feel free to pass this on to your friends as well.

Enjoy!

If You're Tired Enough, You Can Snooze Anywhere

 Big snow coming, so I stopped at the station to get gas for the snowblower. I was distracted by a sleeping dog. 

There was a pickup with the passenger window open. A dog was draped over the window sill the way a cat drapes herself along the back of a couch. When I walked over a little closer to take a picture, the dog opened its eyes. But it still didn't lift its head up off the sideview mirror.