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Wildlife is reclaiming Yosemite National Park
181–190 of 237 posts
Re: Wildlife is reclaiming Yosemite National Park
#182It's nice to know that the earth starts to heal so quickly after humans are gone. Although by the time we are actually gone we might make it uninhabitable for other life too.
Philosophical question: if humans are gone, does it really matter what happens to the earth?
It matters to me what will happen when we're gone.
Re: Wildlife is reclaiming Yosemite National Park
#183> This month is typically a busy month in Yosemite: Of the almost 4.6 million tourists that visited the valley in 2019, about 308,000 came during April. "This month is typically a busy one: less than 1/12th of the number of annual visitors." ️
yeah, this sentence jumped out on me too, making the whole article so less convincing. those schools of journalism should really include basic math in their core corriculum.
April is the median, but below the mean, which is skewed by the visitor totals in July and August, the busiest months of the year, at more than 600k visitors each. Knowledge of basic math is very important before you accuse a journalist of lacking basic math skills.
Left out of the math discussion though is that Tuolumne Meadows is usually still closed in April to activities and also frequently to through traffic, meaning that all 300,000 visitors are bound for Yosemite Valley, which represents about 2% of the total area of Yosemite National Park.
Yosemite definitely feels busy in April, even if it feels busier in the Summer and Fall.
Re: Wildlife is reclaiming Yosemite National Park
#184I never understood why no animal has emerged to fill the niche of hunting squirrels in the suburbs? They’re everywhere. (Same question for pigeons)
Feral cats, maybe? There's just a shit-ton of squirrels and pigeons, is my guess as to why there still seems to be so many of them.
I'm a firm believer that I should be allowed to hunt squirrels during squirrel season in the suburbs. They're so big there.
Re: Wildlife is reclaiming Yosemite National Park
#185A month without humans, bears are moving through survey zones more frequently. The problem highlighted here is our methods for setting up survey zones is terrible and is severely UNDERCOUNTING the population. Even more troubling is systems of surveillance like these provide the inputs for the climate change models we've depended on and which have predicted we'll all be extinct in 50 years. I swear by the end of Covid…
Earth temperature and vegetation biomass readings are done by an army of earth facing satellites checking the entirety of the earth daily using a variety of different sensors and techniques.
Re: Wildlife is reclaiming Yosemite National Park
#186I never understood why no animal has emerged to fill the niche of hunting squirrels in the suburbs? They’re everywhere. (Same question for pigeons)
We'd kill them before they could fill the niche.
Re: Wildlife is reclaiming Yosemite National Park
#187> "The bear population has quadrupled," said [Ahwahnee Hotel employee Dane] Peterson... > "It's not like they aren’t usually here," he said of the bears, bobcats and coyotes that he and other employees now see congregating outside their cabins and apartments. "It's that they usually hang back at the edges, or move in the shadows." Edit: The title used here omits the quotation marks of the article title, making it mor…
As I discovered on an evening hike once when I encountered a few cougars.
Sex jokes aside. . .
How do you encounter 'a few cougars'? I've only ever run into them as single animals. They're very solitary.
Re: Wildlife is reclaiming Yosemite National Park
#188I hope we keep it closed, more or less. They could restrict visitors using a lottery system. No motorized vehicles within the park boundaries. The valley would have a chance in that scenario. Otherwise it will just be swamped by even greater crowds rushing in to "enjoy" (really destroy) the beautiful nature. I visited Yosemite valley proper for the first time last year after living in California for five years. I was…
The goal of a park (particularly the valley) is to allow as many people as possible to see and appreciate it. There are hundreds of thousands of square miles of empty wilderness in the Sierra (including in Yosemite) , with much of it similar in scale to Yosemite.
Your story is a good example for one of the goals of parks, but you seem to have missed the point. If you've never been to the Yosemite after living in CA for a few years, then you likely wouldn't expend a lot of effort to see wild places in nature. Thus, Yosemite is a perfect place for you to see and appreciate since it is spectacular and relatively accessible.
With your newfound appreciation, you now can advocate for the preservation and protection of wild places – though preferably not in the sense that you want to prevent others from having your experience, and rather in the sense that you should want to advocate for the protection of undeveloped wilderness.
Re: Wildlife is reclaiming Yosemite National Park
#189I never understood why no animal has emerged to fill the niche of hunting squirrels in the suburbs? They’re everywhere. (Same question for pigeons)
Red-tailed hawks are pretty prolific at hunting squirrels in urban areas. There are even pairs nesting in Central Park in NY and subsisting almost entirely on squirrels. Peregrine Falcons also hunt pigeons in Urban areas and again there are dozens of pairs nesting in the NY City metro area. Predators generally tend to find an equilibrium with their prey animals in an area, so they're not going to completely eliminate their prey.
Re: Wildlife is reclaiming Yosemite National Park
#190I never understood why no animal has emerged to fill the niche of hunting squirrels in the suburbs? They’re everywhere. (Same question for pigeons)
Feral cats, maybe? There's just a shit-ton of squirrels and pigeons, is my guess as to why there still seems to be so many of them. I'm a firm believer that I should be allowed to hunt squirrels during squirrel season in the suburbs. They're so big there.
You can. They sell pellet guns at Walmart. Good ones that will kill a squirrel. From experience understand giving one to kids will likely end with a pellet through a window or through a shoe.