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Squirrels, Cities, and Climate

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  November 2nd, 2009 at 07:58 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

It’s the little things that illustrate the big problems with the common evidence that the Earth is heating up rapidly. Take this picture I took yesterday afternoon, as I hiked on out to Wal-Mart to check on after-Halloween cheap candy*:

Squirrel

I always get a kick out of seeing these little guys running around. You see, when I first set foot in Moreno Valley almost a quarter century ago**, I didn’t see this kind of wildlife running around. We’re at the edge of the desert, and as the town was first being developed, the only things I saw were the big old tumbleweeds rolling down the street on every windy day. Brown, dry, and prickly, they weren’t very friendly to little guys like in that picture above.

But now, years later, the town’s different. All the dry, empty spaces full of tumbleweeds are gone, replaced with buildings with lots of grass, trees, and bright green landscaping. The plants are different, the animals underfoot are different, and even the birds are different. Long ago the only birds I’d ever see are big, ugly blackbirds. Now there’s a variety around, and I hear all different kinds of bird songs in the mornings instead of just the honking of those blackbirds.

This is all anecdotal, and proves little, but it illustrates a greater point: it is not in dispute at all that human development changes the local climate. When people move into a desert area, the area gets wetter, greener, and friendlier to life that can move in afterward. Likewise, as a town builds into a bigger, older, more populous city, all of that greenery starts getting replaced with heat-absorbing concrete and asphalt, raising temperatures in the vicinity.

That last part is called the Heat Island effect. It’s real, it’s known, and it’s why the traditional temperature records going back 100 or more years are virtually useless for tracking the greater climate of the world. The only valid records we have for temperatures, therefore, are the satellite records that avoid such local effects. Those only go back 30 years or so.

And that is so little time on a geological scale. Too little to confirm any theory as the truth, inconvenient or otherwise.

* Wal-Mart is too efficient and had none left, sadly.

** Yes, I feel old writing that.

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  • bs

    My pump-action BB gun is sitting a few feet from me. It’s the most effective way to keep the little b#@$@(!s off my bird feeder.

  • JadedByPolitics

    to keep them fat and happy here in Virginia :)

  • DONTTREADONME

    I could really use some of his relaxing painting tonight after all of the raining on the conservative’s excitement.

  • penguin2

    squirrels. And I enjoy watching them get the food from the bird feeder, despite it being “squirrel proof.” And I know you don’t have a bit of guilt for doing in the poor critters.

  • http://moelane.com/ Moe Lane

    …were addicted to Fritos, the lot of them.

    Oh, well, the bags were cheap anyway.

  • Achance

    and just sit back to watch the competition between the Stellar’s Jays and the squirrels for that ear of corn. When we have that going on and the chickadees, junkos, and thrushes are all after the bird feeders, the sliding glass door to the deck and back yard is like big screen TV for the cats. I don’t much let the cats out though when the birds are around the feeders; hunting in a baited field just isn’t sporting. They’re getting a little age on them, but they can still get a shrew or a bird from time to time without help from me.

    To your major point, it is amazing what “settling” does to the land, most of it good. Thirty years ago when I first came here, it was spruce, fir, and hemlock with an understory of cottonwood, willows, and alders. If you’ve never been around them, cottonwood trees are large, nasty weeds that rot out in their centers in a few years and fall on your house. I clearcut all cottonwoods and alders on my property. I had a couple of Mountain Ash and I kept them; they’re pretty, especially in Fall, but really messy.

    Fast forward thirty years. There’s been a lot of cultivation of all sorts of trees and shrubs and many of them are reproducing naturally and spreading. We now actully have color in autumn because there are all sorts of maples now to give some contrast to the dull brown of the cottonwoods, willows, and alders. About the only birds you used to see much were the ubiquitours ravens, eagles, and sea gulls, and rufus hummingbirds in the spring and summer as they migrated through. As the flora has become more diverse, so has the fauna and species that used to perhaps linger a few days during their migration now set up shop for the whole warm season. The squirrels have always been here but they’re bigger, fatter, and more numerous than they used to be. The shrews and mice are all gone around my house – Catogenic genocide.

  • JadedByPolitics

    the trash out front on trash day as well! They are just scavengers :)

  • Ausonius

    He showed the Path to Enpaintenment!

    And..his 70′s Afro was awesome!

    An American original: he showed how you could take your very little talent – or even none at all – and develop it with some simple techniques which required very little, or no, talent.

    On squirrels: in Ohio we have some which like to stand on two legs far too long and give the impression they are bipedal!

    Also: in the last 20 years we have noticed in western and northwestern Ohio the appearance and spread of black squirrels. I assume they can be found elsewhere.

    Is this a harbinger of colder weather, since black fur would absorb the heat better when things are cold? Or just a coincidence?

    Any black squirrels in your area?

  • Tbone

    with a press agent.

  • gonzo55

    guess we need to tax him; little bugger’s going to heat up the Earth!

  • bs
  • gekster

    You might need them later.

    Attic squrrels are different though.
    You have to get rid of those critters.

    JadedByPolitics has it right. Feed them and make them fat. Teach them math and wait.

    If the Obamamites manage to get thier way,
    then you might be needing some of them for supper.
    LOL

  • thomasburkby

    The “heat island” effect definitely has skewed much of the data on which the anthropogenic global warming hoax is based. However, there is wonderful, reliable data going back much more than 30 years for some sites, such as the Hanford atomic energy reservation in Washington State — a vast tract that is little more developed now than it was 60 years ago. Those data – viewable on the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory website (http://hms.pnl.gov/) – reveal wide variations from year to year, but overall no warming trend, much less a “hockey stick” sprint into the ovens.

    Black squirrels are a “melanistic variety” of the eastern grey squirrel. Here in the Washington DC area, they have been numerous for many decades after their introduction by the Smithsonian. Zoologists believe that they were the dominant variety of squirrel in North America prior to European settlement, because their dark color allowed them to hide in the dark, virgin forests better. In addition, they are better adapted to withstand bitter cold. If AGW were valid, they would be dying off, but no, they are thriving as compared with the “mainstream” grey squirrels.

  • ajl_mo

    >But now, years later, the town?s different. All the dry, empty spaces full of tumbleweeds are gone, replaced with buildings with lots of grass, trees, and bright green landscaping.
    **********
    You can probably thank irrigation for that. (That’s a varigated pittosporum in the background. Not a water hog but needs a bit of attention in a dry climate.)

    The office I worked at in Phoenix AZ had some long term Valley residents (going back to 60′s) and even an AZ native or two (didn’t run into them very often). They told me the huge increase in residential/commercial irrigation had made great deal of difference in the type of animals they’d see. One of the projects I worked on had increasing the species and numbers of birds into the area by providing access to water.

    If you give ‘em water in a dry climate, they will come.

  • Ausonius

    This is what I suspected. In fact, in my wife’s hometown in northwestern Ohio, the gray squirrels are almost gone: the black ones have taken over.

    By the way, urban hawks are becoming more prevalent in my city of 1 million! How bad can the environment be?

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    The difference is huge.

  • http://www.skiloveland.com skicougar

    I have put asorted nuts out there and the cashews always go first. They may be scavengers; but they know good stuff when they see it.

    And yes, they are rodents that happen to look cute; but you’ll never get rid of them all as long as trees grow food for them for free, might as well enjoy them.

    I mean, the ones at my house follow me to the front door after work begging for cashews. That rings about a 8 on a women’s sweet guy o’meter.

  • proudmarinemom

    So, the Smithsonian’s involvement explains why the black (melanistic, you say?) squirrels are so numerous on the Maryland side of the river!

    Here on the Virginia side, we have only gray or ginger-wannabe squirrels. I have never once seen a black squirrel in No. Virginia, so they must be poor swimmers. Those tiny lifevests are no match for Potomac currents.

    I wonder why they don’t make a run for it across the American Legion bridge? Could it be the indepletable supply of nuts on that side of the river?

  • http://www.redstate.com/tnjim TNJim

    although I’ve lived where I do now for 42 years.

    There’s always been squirrels and large variety of songbirds, and at night you could hear the owls, screech and Great Horned. It was all farmland here at the time, with cattle everywhere. My grandfather offered his 6 children an acre of land from his 160 acre cattle farm if they wanted it but since all but my mom and I were pretty much established where they already were, Mom was the only one who took him up on it. We were in a trailer park at the time, so Papaw was glad she was willing to get out of there.

    When he passed on in the mid-70′s, Mom, and the rest of them decided to sell the farm. It was bought by a developer and the subdivision that grew up around us was born. As time went on other neighboring farms saw their owners pass on and the descendants of those families likewise sold out to subdivision developers.

    Interestingly enough, you never saw deer before that surge of development in the 80′s and 90′s and only the occasional raccoon. No hawks either, despite all the chickens on those farms. This despite a state park only 2 miles down the road. Come to think of it, you almost never saw deer in and around the park.

    But after the subdivisions grew up around the mid 90′s the deer bagan moving in. The park was the first place, with the golf course being a favorite hangout for them. I guess the small gardens people put out attracted them into the subdivisions, and so by the mid 2000′s people stopped putting out gardens. You couldn’t keep the deer out. About the same time the raccoons became nearly as ubiquitous as the deer.

    Now it’s almost like a wildlife preserve here, despite the human encroachment. Deer are a nuisance, it’s like Russian roulette coming home from work each night. Golfers may rule the course by day, but it’s covered by deer at night. When I turn into my driveway it’s not unusual to see as many as 6 in my backyard, sometimes bedded down! Coyotes can be heard almost as often as the owls at night, and hawks circle overhead by day. The squirrels are still there, I have 2 huge oaks in my yard, but curiously the rabbits seem to have vanished. Although no one in the valley or the park has reported seeing a bear yet they have been spotted around the neighborhoods closer to the city of Kingsport, of all places. Maybe the fumes from the big chemistry set on the river known as Eastman attracts them, who knows.

    It’s why I laugh at the greenies who want to claim a certain species of owl or whatever can only live in old growth forest. Want wildlife? Build a neighborhood!

  • http://www.redstate.com/tnjim TNJim
  • http://www.redstate.com/tnjim TNJim

    but about 10 uears ago I was watching a NASCAR race at a friends house. He likes to channel surf when the commercials come on and it happened Bob was on the PBS channel. I was fascinated by the detail he could put into a painting by just dabbing at the canvas. Awesome stuff.

    Check out his site here. You can get DVD’s of the show plus other instructional videos here.