Beth's Everything Blog

Archive for the ‘Environment’ Category

Only eight days into the new year, and already we are knee deep in the politics of choosing the next president. It’s a dirty business, full of partial truths, innuendos, and out and out lies. My stomach turns over when I read the vitriolic comments on the internet. It seems few can have reasonable discussions without name calling, even the so-called intellectuals. Very tiresome. Worse still, it’s only the beginning. Somehow we must slog through the muck until November.

At least we can be grateful that the Iowa caucuses are over. In a state of some 3,000,000 people, 91 % of whom are Caucasian, less than 150,000 or maybe 4 % of the population voted, 25% for Mitt and 25% for Rick, who is, politically speaking,  far right of the far right.

And speaking of Iowa, did you read that some farmers are selling their Iowa farmland for as high as $13,000 an acre? Iowa farmers are the state’s new millionaires because corn and soybean prices have gone through the roof. A farmland  bubble or will it last?

Just to start you thinking, here are a few things that have happened under President Obama administration: *Energy producing plants must begin preparing to produce 15% of their energy from renewable sources, *Vaccination programs have been expanded, *We now have a State Children’s Health Insurance Program that covers health care for 4 million more children,  and *Federal support for stem-cell and new biomedical research.

On my new Wildlife calendar this year is a picture of a polar bear with her young cub who’s chances of survival are less than 40% and decreasing because the arctic ice is melting faster each year. Polar bears do not hibernate like brown bears so they are forced to swim longer and longer distances to find food.

One last thought. As I write this, the outdoor temperature is 60 degrees. Louie and I jumped at the chance to take advantage of the strange but great walking weather. The park was full of little people. Louie loves those children and you could almost see him smile as he sat patiently letting their tiny, little fingers poke and pet him.

We Americans ‘sort of ‘ got what we wanted. The senate passed (89 to 10) an extension of a cut to the Social Security payroll tax, albeit only a two-month extension, and jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed, though only a for a few months.

But . . . Republicans attached a rider speeding up the  process for the construction of Keystone Pipeline XL.

President Obama says it will be okay though because the approval process  for the legislation carries a tight deadline which will ease his ability to stop the project more quickly. (?) What we need to do now is write/call The President and beg that he stop the “dirty, dangerous, oil pipeline proposal [which] would bring corrosive oil from Canada through America’s Heartland. It would be devastating to our air, our water and our climate,” says The National Sierra Club.

In the meantime, grab your warm coat and your binoculars and join 60,000 other Americans in the Audubon Christmas Bird Count. It’s fun and you might just be able to save the birds, our habitat and humanity. Go to Count Date Search to find out a place closest to you.

According to the National Audubon Society, the count takes place within “Count Circles,” which focus on specific geographical areas. Each circle is led by a Count Compiler. Therefore, if you are a beginning birder, you will be able to join a group that includes at least one experienced birdwatcher. In addition, if your home is within the boundaries of a Count Circle, then you can stay home and report the birds that visit your feeder once you have arranged to do so with the Count Compiler. There is a $5 fee to participate in the CBC for all field participants aged 19 or older. Please see our frequently asked questions to learn more. If you have never been on a CBC before your first step is to locate and contact your local Count Compiler to find out how you can volunteer.

Chickadees in decline

Every year, I start off the summer full of great ambitions and overzealous hope all due to the beautiful seed catalogs that begin arriving in January. However, over the years I’ve learned to be more realistic. I now only order a couple of plants I know are indigenous to my backyard. For us, that’s daisies, black-eyes susans and zinnias. So this year, I ordered what I thought was a variety of big, colorful, tall zinnia seeds. In April, I broke out the peat pots and grow lights. I’ve also learned that when all my plants are ready to go outside, it’s me that has to put them there, so I’m careful about how many I start.

The zinnias looked strong and healthy from the minute they popped up, the best I’ve ever grown. I had to set them outside a little early because they grew so fast they began to get leggy. I hadn’t yet gotten around to preparing their sunny bed by the porch. Panicking, I planted them around the brand new walking stick bush by the front door not remembering it gets sun only in the afternoon.

I won’t bore you with details, but the zinnias were a huge disappointment. Though they grew at least three feet tall, they have the tiniest, puniest flowers I’ve ever seen. Most are pale in color, not the vibrant reds and yellows I’d expected. I tried pruning them to make them shrubbier, but that didn’t work. They just got taller. They weren’t even suitable for cutting.

Still, I have this obsession about killing things (except cockroaches) so even though I have to look at them every time I go in or out, I’ve left them alone.

Well! Beauty is definitely in the eyes of the beholder. After writing all day, I often collapse into a comfortable chair in the family room near a window overlooking the ugly zinnias. One afternoon, half asleep, I saw something iridescent quivering above the plants, a tiny female hummingbird. She hovered over a puny butter colored zinnia before flitting on to a pink one the size of a thimble. I saw her the next day and the next and soon she’d brought a whole herd of hummer friends with her, fluttering and fighting over my zinnias.

It’s still only the middle of august so the hummingbirds won’t leave for another month. Meanwhile, every afternoon around four thirty we have the pleasure of watching them feed, their voracious appetites demanding they suck the nectar out of my apparently delicious zinnias.

PS: Honeybees and butterflies like them too. Yipee!!

Nebbish zinnias

honeybee on nebbish zinnia

The world record sale in 2006 of a Gustav Klimt portrait marked the culmination of its sensational journey from the salons of Vienna  via the hands of Nazi looters to the Neue Museum in New York.  The painting is a portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, a beautiful wealthy Austrian woman which took Klimt 3 years and hundreds of drawings to produce.   This is a story that fascinates the public not only because at that time it became the world’s most expensive painting but also because it is at the center of a sensational case about Nazi looted art  The journey of Adele ended 68 years of injustice.  When an arbitration court ruled that Vienna’s state owned Belvedere Gallery must return 5 Klimt paintings to Maria Altmann, a U.S. citizen now living in California who was the last direct relative of their original owner, restitution experts reacted with joy and disbelief.  This case was a bitter legal battle that was waged for more than seven years, and it was a classic David and Goliath confrontation that most experts thought impossible to win.  A federal court in California and then the U.S. Supreme Court determined that Altmann could sue the Republic of Austria in the U.S. courts for the return of the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer which had been stolen by the Nazis in World War II.  The Austrian government had claimed immunity as a sovereign nation, but its case was finally turned down.  Austria, confronted with a full U.S. trial finally agreed to arbitration and appointed Austrian arbitrators .

Altmann’s ultimate victory was a bad day for the Austrian government, whose government officials had planned and plotted and blocked the return of the Bloch-Bauer Klimts for over 60 years.  Losing the art was about so much more than money; it was a terrible blow to Austria’s pride and heritage. Gustave Klimt is an Austrian icon, the most celebrated artist in his lifetime.  His works stand as the most important of the Jugendsthil and Secessionist movements and the portrait of Adele is his finest work.  It is an elaborately gold embellished canvas and one of Klimt’s most notable masterpieces.  Adele is seated as if in a floating sea of gold with signs and symbols as decoration on her mantle that hark back to the Ravenna Byzantine gold mosaics imagery but also look forward with geometric decorations to the future.  Rumors abound that Adele and Klimt had a 12 year affair; this portrait took 3 years to complete and almost 200 preparatory drawings so that took up some time.  It is known that her arranged marriage was not a happy one; her personal maid and her physician both confirmed the relationship of painter and subject.  But to return from the tangential aspects of the story, Adele was the wife of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, the owner of Austria’s largest sugar refinery.  He assembled the biggest most valuable collections of 17th century porcelain and 19th century Austrian art.  Adele inherited a fortune from her banker father.  Together they were among Vienna’s  moat prominent art patrons.  Fin de siecle Vienna rivalled Paris largely through the cultural passions of families such as theirs.  The Bloch-Bauers  lived in unimaginable luxury in a mansion where all the art including the paintings Ferdinand commissioned from Klimt were displayed.  Adele held her famous weekly salons for guests like Gustav and Alma Mahler, Richard Strauss, artists Klimt, Egon Schiele, Kokoschka, the writers Stefan Zweig and Arthur Schnitzler, and leading socialist theoreticians. Yet there was little happiness in the marriage.  She was known to be a rather cold intellectual  a woman who was very politically aware, but she was childless.  Her double niece, Maria Altmann, said she remembered her as extremely elegant tall, dark and thin.  When she died of meningitis at the age of 43, her husband turned her bedroom into a memorial chapel hung with all their Klimts and freshly cut flowers.

Niece Maria Altmann married an aspiring opera singer in the last fashionable Jewish wedding before the Germans annexed Austria.  Her uncle gave her a diamond necklace and earrings which had belonged to Adele as a wedding present. In the following March, Hitler’s troops marched into Vienna amid ringing bells and jubilant people.  One week later a Gestapo official  came to her door; he took all her valuables incuding her engagement ring and Adele’s necklace and earrings.  These were later presented to Hitler’s deputy, Hermann Goering, as a gift for his wife.  The next day her husband was arrested, imprisoned, and later deported to Dachau.  His brother Bernhard had a successful cashmere business in Austria, but he had moved to Paris.  The Nazis said that they would release Maria’s husband if he signed over his knitwear factory to them.  He did so and Fritz was freed.  Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer’s assets, including the sugar refinery, his two homes and his art collections had already been seized and he had fled to Switzerland.  The Altmanns were under house arrest but they managed to escape to England and then moved to America in 1940. Ferdinand died in 1945.  In his will, drawn up several weeks earlier, he named Maria Altmann and her sister and brother as his heirs.  However there was virtually nothing of value in the estate.  The Vienna mansion was now the headquarters of the Austrian State Railway; shares from the sugar company held in trust under Ferdinand’s name by a Swiss bank had been sold to an investor with Nazi connections; the summer palace in Prague became the chief residence of Reinhard Heydrich, who ruled Czechoslovakia and helped mastermind the “final solution”.  After Heydrich’s assassination in 1941, other Germans plundered its treasures and after the war ended the property was sequestered by the Czech communist government.   Bloch-Bauer’s art collection had been divided up; many works had been presented to Hitler, Goering and other deputies while ohers lay in a German depot with thousands of looted artworks earmarked for Hitler’s planned musuem in Linz.  Maria Altmann said that the porcelain collection had been auctioned off.  She knew that everything was gone but she was busy with 3 small children and struggling to make a living.   They did hire a lawyer but he found that the heirs had no claim to the Klimts, because they had been donated to the Belvedere Gallery allegedly under the terms of Adele’s will.  The heirs did not ever see the will but assumed that this was so.  …………continued tomorrow, July 30th.

If you live in Kansas, there are about four days in the spring and four days in the fall when you can comfortably get outside and garden. (Comfortably is the operative word.) Like the rest of the country, we’ve had incredible amounts of rain so weeds are bountiful. One day last week, I decided I had to do something about them before they choked out everything else. I knelt in the bed by the patio with my back to the fence ready to weed my way forward when I heard the most beautiful bird song. I looked up to see a brown thrasher not ten feet away pecking between the patio bricks. I sat very still until he flew up to a branch on the silver maple and continued singing. Then he flew into a bushy spirea under our bedroom window. I waited until he emerged and then cautiously peeked around the bush until I spotted his Missus sitting nervously on a nest. Thrilled, I backed away.

Nesting birds fascinate me even if they are only sparrows. Our yard is a jungle of cedar, pine, perennials, bird baths, ponds and weeds so ferreting out all the bird nests isn’t easy.  For example, a cardinal pair chose the gutter over the recreation room as their ideal spot. ??? I kept seeing the mom and pop team on the roof but it took me awhile to figure out what they were doing up there.

The silver maple is over a hundred years old. It is hollow all the way up and down and I shudder every time we have a big windstorm for fear it will blow down. It is, however, the perfect place for the neighborhood wild life to raise their young. Many generations of squirrels and raccoons have grown up there, not to mention blackbirds and woodpeckers. Fights do occur but all in all, they seem to get along remarkably well and to see two black eyed baby raccoons huddled together in the crouch of the tree while mama goes a hunting brings a smile to even the most urbanized souls.

Near the back fence sits an old shed in which we once stored gardening stuff. I mention it only because a hole underneath has become the favorite place for a ‘possum to raise her seemingly inexhaustible supply of young.  A year or two ago, Louie carefully brought in six babies, one at a time. Each was about six inches long not counting the tail and had little needle sharp teeth. The first one ran under the sofa and we had to call the Prairie Village dog catcher to get him out. After that, we learned to pluck them up immediately by their tails (being extremely careful of those sharp teeth) and put them on the far side of back fence hoping mom would find them there. That summer we also learned, much to our neighbor’s relief, that me must shut the doggy door at bedtime. Otherwise, Louie would roam his territory all night long chasing and barking at nocturnal beings.

Back to bird watching, we now have purple finches at our feeders. I used to see them when lived on our farm down south but climate change has forced them to move further north. Now, they mingle with the red house finch and we have to look close to tell them apart. They aren’t the only backyard birds on the move. The Audubon Society did a study in 2009 and found 305 birds that are changing their winter and summer grounds including Robins, owls and chickadees. Wherever you live, be on the lookout for new species to your backyard.

Purple finch on the  left: House finch on the right