66 Million

In browsing about I found that there are 66 million Americans engaged in wildlife observation and photography and they spend like 36 billion dollars every year.

Planet Earth on with the Snow Leopard footage (they shot film??)...and the mountain sheep of the Himalayas...this is the same predator prey relationship of the mountain sheep and lion on the East Side hereabouts...I have in mind someday to get footage of these my own self!!

Snow Leopards are awesome.

Now someone is kayaking down an Alaskan glacier snow melt stream.

I have no notion of what's been in the news today, or yesterday...was gonna do a post on Nature's defenses...a counter to that famous bit in the song After the Gold Rush..."look at Mother Nature on the run..."...and had a dream of a wind storm...and I think there's been a typhoon in Bangladesh or somewhere...needless to say Nature always has the last word...and can be scary.

In the Creek I haven't found any fish all Spring, Summer and early Fall, but today I saw what I thought was oil bubbling up in a pond (the Creek has dried to point it is a series of gravel beaches and ponds) as there was a little bit of a slick..but the bubbles were finger length trout nudging the surface..I think they'll be okay as this pond is being fed somehow from underground...there's an underground Creek as water is reaching the Merced...the little bit of oil sheen must have come from the work done to remove the footbridge...the little trout dont look happy oaring their fins in the still water.

"Nature isn't sentimental"...comment made in the Planet Earth show....and of course something was soon eaten...and it's not so....I see the 'sentiments' of Nature in the critters all the time. I think what they're trying to say, is that often in Nature a critter has to stand on it's own at birth...unlike say, mama bear and two cubs who, whom, hearabout, have to deal with the unsentimental tourist environs to bears. The cubs (these are the same that visited Last Chance

Food Heaven) hopped into a wob, and couldn't get out until found and let out. This family has been all over all summer in and out of everything, and for the cubs to learn all these ins and outs at an early age can only spell their doom.

Uploaded the Merced trout at Creek's End too...they were big..and mating.

DavidDavid

Tree in the Door

Nov. 18, 2007