COLORADO
A specter is haunting the streets of Denver, warns businessman Dan Maes, a Tea Party denizen who hopes to become the next governor of Colorado. The threat is “very well disguised, but it will be exposed,” Maes promised supporters. And what exactly is it that threatens our freedom? In a word, bicycles — the riding of which through car-dominated streets spins us all toward international domination under the United Nations.
You might wonder how bikes could convert Denver into a U.N. province, but Maes told the Denver Post that you just had to see through the fuzzy rhetoric about green cars, public transportation and anything else touted as an alternative to automobiles. Maes said that by participating in an international group that promotes bike riding as an environmentally friendly activity, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, the Democratic candidate for governor, promotes a “dream philosophy” that threatens individual rights. However, Maes also allowed that some might find his theories “kooky.”
Somewhat surprisingly for a political newcomer, Maes recently beat the Republican Party favorite, Scott McInnis, for the Republican nomination, and he will now face Hickenlooper at the polls in November.
THE WEST
 It turns out that trash isn’t one of the “bear necessities” in the Aspen area, according to a new study by Colorado State University. Fifty black bears were tracked over five years in Pitkin County, where there’s a history of bears clawing their way into restaurants and homes. However, researchers found that, given a choice, bears preferred wild berries and oak acorns to leftover pizza and whatever other goodies they could unearth from garbage cans. And contrary to popular belief, the bears never became “addicted” to human food, always preferring forest-grown when it was available. Sometimes, though, bears can’t resist a manmade treat.
A newly opened paintball course on the side of a ski hill near Billings, Mont., had to close after bears — both grizzlies and black bears — developed a craving for the paintballs. It turns out that the colorful globs contained a yummy vegetable oil. “A wildlife official said some bears were even eating unexploded paintballs,” reports The Associated Press.
WASHINGTON
A bank officer who has earned the title “Duck Man” did it again for the third year in a row in Spokane: He saved the day by helping ducks fly away. Joel Armstrong watched a nest outside his office window until he realized that the ducklings were itching to take off. But the little birds were 15 feet from the ground, so he “rushed down to the pavement to catch them as they fell from their ledge.” Then Duck Man carried them through traffic to the river, reports The Week magazine. Acting as guardian angel, Armstrong has caught 26 birds “and hasn’t dropped one yet.”
THE WEST
Ducklings in urban settings may be charming, but pigeons? In Carson City, Nev., “pigeons have gotten the best of the state Division of Insurance that oversees a multimillion dollar industry.” Once pigeons took up residence in the building’s ventilation system, 75 employees began getting sick with sore throats and breathing problems, reports the Las Vegas Sun. The heating and air conditioning systems were replaced and a variety of lethal chemicals were sprayed, but nothing helped, so workers are moving to a new office, costing the state $1.4 million for a five-year lease.
Then there are European starlings, those noisy black birds that love North America so much they’ve grown from a mere 100, when they were introduced to New York City’s Central Park in the early 1890s, to 200 million today. It’s truly a success story, albeit an unfortunate one for native birds, air travel and agriculture. Now one of the most common birds in the United States, “starlings breed like crazy, eat almost anything, are highly mobile and operate in overwhelming numbers,” reports AP. They also make an “intimidating statement as they swirl in vast clouds called murmurations.”
Nationally, the federal Wildlife Services spends millions of dollars trying to kill or harass starlings, which take an estimated yearly toll of $800 million on agriculture. Despite spending more on poisoning starlings than any other state, Washington remains a favorite hangout for the birds. At one feedlot, 200,000 starlings gather each day, “lining fence tops, wires, water troughs and even perching on top of cows.” Then when the cows get fed, the birds descend to snatch the best bits. Yet their biggest threat to people occurs at airports, where they sometimes collide with planes. At Salt Lake City International airport, where there have been 19 reported starling-plane strikes in the last 20 years, wildlife biologist Mike Smith has been trapping and poisoning the birds, once netting 800 in one day. But it’s clear that starlings are tough to control, much less eliminate.
Says Greg Butcher of the National Audubon Society, “They’re great survivors and quite the biological machine.”
SOUTH DAKOTA
Ouch: A fierce thunderstorm in Vivian, S.D., dropped the fattest hailstone ever recorded — one pound 15 ounces — fortunately not on the head of the ranch worker who found it. Other ice balls left craters in the ground six inches deep, reports the Washington Post.
Betsy Marston is the editor of Writers on the Range, an op ed syndication service of High Country News (hcn.org). Tips of Western weirdness are always appreciated for the Heard Around the West column (betsym@hcn.org). |