Twin Cities Naturalist

The November 2009 edition of the Twin Cities Naturalist Podcast is now online. Click the player below to listen.



This month's show topped out at a new record of 29 minutes. We usually try to keep them shorter but we had a great time interviewing two guests this month, Jamie McBride and April Rust. Jamie was the outgoing president and April was the incoming president of the Minnesota Naturalists' Association. We caught up with them at Lake Shetek in southern Minnesota at the annual Minnesota Naturalists' Association conference.

Last Month's Trivia Answer:
Last month's question asked what piece of land was set aside as the first state park by the Minnesota legislature but never actually became a park? Who now owns the land and by what name do we call it?

The person with the correct answer was Oakley. Way to go! She knew that the land is Minnehaha Park which is now owned and operated by the City of Minneapolis.

Will you be the first to answer this month's question? Listen to the show and post your answer in the comments section. You can comment on the show by clicking on "comments" at the top of the post.


Community Calendar
These are the events mentioned on the Community Calendar for the show. If you have an event you'd like promoted on the December episode send it to kirkmona (at symbol) yahoo (dot) com.

October 17, 2009, through May 9, 2010
Hungry Planet: What the World Eats at the Bell Museum
Grocery lists and dining tables of people around the globe captured in fascinating photos and hands-on displays that explore issues of food in the 21st century.


• December 3, 2009, 7:00 p.m.
  Dakota Lodge, Thompson County Park, 360 Butler Ave. East, West St. Paul
  The Minnesota Native Plant Society is hosting the program “Salvage Logging in St. Croix State Park,” by Gretchen Heaser, St. Croix State Park Resources Specialist
  
  
• December 5, 2009, 9:00-5:00 Minnesota Ornithological Union annual paper session at the Bell Museum.
  
  

I had the opportunity to watch the release of a Saw-whet Owl back into the wild today. One of our volunteers brought our captive American Kestrel back from the Raptor Center where it was having a check-up and when they realized she was heading back to the nature center they asked if she would mind releasing a Saw-whet Owl on our property. We have good habitat for them so we said it would be great. It is always interesting to see a release. The Saw-whet owl is the smallest owl in Minnesota and almost the smallest owl in the world. Here's a photo from just pre-release. It seemed pretty interested in the camera.


The owl had hit a building but was now all recovered and ready to go back to the wild. I brought along a camera that can record a series of photos at 15 frames per second hoping to catch the release. The results are below!

Photo Credit: Kirk Mona

One of the more interesting parts of my job as a professional naturalist is that I get to work with live raptors. These are what we call education birds. They are wild raptors iving in captivity and all have some reason they cannot be released back to the wild. Our Barred Owl is blind in one eye from a head injury. Our Red-tailed Hawk has a slightly misaligned jaw and our American Kestrel is an imprinted bird. We have a new fourth bird in training right now but you'll have to stop back as we're not revealing what it is yet.

With all these hungry raptors around we need a lot of raptor food. Unfortunately, you cannot pick it up at the grocery store. One of the main things we feed our raptors is pocket gopher. We are often able to get them for free from local trappers who remove them from farmer's fields. The animals would normally just be thrown away so we're happy to take them off their hands.

The reason I'm telling you all this is that it sometimes makes for interesting photos. For example, there are very few places of work where you need this sign on a garbage can.

The odd thing I've seen lately is that we've been storing gophers in the freezer in this Bloody Mary box. Once you've seen or had to eviscerate a gopher yourself, the box actually starts to make sense.
~Kirk

Xcel energy got approval last Thursday from the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to store more nuclear waste at their Prairie Island Nuclear facility. I have some mixed feelings about this but mostly they are negative. Back in the 1990s I was in high school and just starting out as an environmental activist. I remember telling my American History professor that I was going to miss class because I was going to go to the state capital for a march, rally and chance to talk to my state representative. There was a big public demonstration against then plant owners Northern States Power when they wanted to install the first round of dry cask storage of nuclear waste on site. I remember my teacher said something to the effect that I would learn a whole lot more about America by going to the march than being in his class so I should go. He then proceeded to give me all kinds of advice on protest marches. It seemed he had some experience himself from back in the day. His biggest piece of advice? Don't get pushed to the front. The people in the front are always the ones who end up having to face the police if things turn ugly. He said, watch for where the organizers are, they are always smart enough to lead from behind.

The reason I was heading to the capital was that Northern States Power (the then owner of Prairie Island) wanted to store nuclear waste outside their facility. Their holding area inside was almost full and they would have to shut down the plant if they could not get more storage. The waste from the storage inside the plant was supposed to be shipped off to a government national repository years earlier but one had never been built. NSP was asking for temporary storage until the Yucca Mountain storage facility in Nevada could be completed. Even as a high school student I could see that the Yucca Mountain facility would never be ready in the optimistic time frame they proposed. The waste "temporarily" stored at Prairie Island has been there for over ten years now and there is no reason to believe it will ever be moved. Yucca Mountain is dead and it now looks like waste will never be stored there.

There is a push right now for more nuclear power as a solution to global warming. Even if we assume we can safely run a nuclear power plant (which is a big if) we still have the problem of how do we safely store the radioactive waste for millions of years. Modern humans only evolved somewhere between 250,000 and 400,000 years ago. Isn't it arrogant to think we can safely store something for millions of years?

The point is moot however because we have already generated huge quantities of highly radioactive fuel waste and it needs to be stored. I'm still not convinced storing high level radioactive waste ON AN ISLAND in the Mississippi, a river that has moved and meandered hundreds of times since it was created, is a good plan. Heck, as little as 10,000 years ago the Prairie Island site was under a mile of ice when glaciers covered Minnesota. I'm interested to see if the law can be changed so that commercial waste can be stored in the WIPP.

Until we have a long term storage plan in this country, nuclear waste will continue to be stored on-site which is just asking for trouble.

I remember talking to my representative at the time and proposing that we instead store the waste in dry casks under the water tower down the street (my representative lived a couple of blocks away.) If it was really so safe we had nothing to fear. He clearly didn't want it in his back yard but he had no problem putting it in someone elses.

Once again, the final decision on whether or not they can store more waste on site will be made by the legislature. Last time around we used it as a bargaining chip for more renewable energy in the state. Lets make sure our legislators do the work of the people and get something in return for the devil's bargain proposed by Xcel.

(photo credit- Prairie Island Plant: Jonathunder)
(photo credit- Dry Cask Storage: Nuclear Regulatory Commission)

I'm going to be really nerdy an assume more than a handful of my readers are familiar with the Large Hadron Collider. For those not in the know, the LHC is the largest particle accelerator in the world. It is operated by CERN and sits on (or rather under) the French/Swiss border. The LHC was built to smash protons together at 99.9999991% the speed of light to split then into parts we we can learn more about the nature of the universe. Specifically the scientists are looking for the Higgs-boson particle. It is theoretical since it has never actually been detected. Some of you may remember the LHC being started up last year to some fan fair as well as some doomsday predictions by those who were concerned it would create strangelets that would devour the earth. The initial start-up had to be scrapped because of a liquid helium leak. Now, a few million dollars later they were ready to start it up again last week and had to do an emergency shut down, again.

When they went up above ground to investigate they discovered a bird sitting on a equipment munching on a piece of a baguette. A crumb of the bread had fallen into the compensating capacitor and caused the short-circuit that caused the temperature rise. When the temp rose the super cooled magnets shut down and everything ground to a halt.

Nice to know a 5.5 billion dollar machine can be foiled by a bird eating a baguette.

The system was re-cooled and some test beams of particles have been shot at least half way around the collider. They will bring the last sections online this week and then start doing low energy collisions shortly thereafter. I'll let you know if the universe unravels.

~Kirk

(photo credit: Arpad Horvath)

Will Steger answered questions this morning on KARE 11 news. Be sure to check it out and do your part for global warming.



~Kirk