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Three hospital patients bitten as mouse plague sweeps western NSW
https://www.theguardian.com/australi...ps-western-nsw

Large swathes of inland New South Wales have been “inundated” with mice and rats, with the rodents getting into homes, hospitals and hotels.Hospitals across western NSW are stepping up baiting and trapping procedures, laying down odour repellents, and blocking up door and window seals to ward off the rodent wave.

NSW Health confirmed that three people, who were attending hospital for non-rat or mice-related reasons, were bitten by mice while being treated at Tottenham, Walgett and Gulargambone in regional NSW.

Farmers across the state are also battling the rodents, with one farmer being given approval to fly a drone that drops poisoned bait to kill them.

Roger Woods, a Queensland farmer who had flown Black Hawk helicopters for 20 years, told Guardian Australia earlier this month that the NSW Environment Protection Authority had approved him to conduct the drone strikes on farms that wanted them.

Alan Brown, a farmer in Wagga Wagga and member of the NSW Farmers Association, told Guardian Australia on Thursday that “it is an absolute plague in the northern half of the state”, with the potential to spread further.

Brown said that he knew of friends and fellow farmers who were “inundated with the things [rodents]”.

“They are causing serious problems now, with people getting bitten,” he said. “Rats are at a nuisance level, but the mice are in plague proportions, particularly in the north and west and south-west of the state.”

Brown said one farmer he had spoken to had lost a crop, worth $200,000 to $300,000, to the insatiable creatures.

“He had a thousand tonne crop of grain sorghum, and it is a complete write-off. They ate the lot. They baited it five times to try and suppress the mice, but they just ate the lot.

“What they were doing is they were climbing up the stalks, chewing the grain heads off, and there were more mice on the ground to clean it up.

“There is a motel in the south-west of the state who closed because they couldn’t keep the mice out of the rooms. Just a disaster. And these are people in the tourism industry already struggling … They [the mice] are doing huge damage.”

The public health director of the Western NSW local health district, Priscilla Stanley, told the ABC that she had received one report of lymphocytic choriomeningitis, a mouse-related illness.

“The disease is linked to mice but it’s very rare,” she told the ABC. “People described sore red eyes as a symptom.”
Brown said the plague would get worse before it gets better.

“It is a plague that has a way to run yet,” he said. “It is developing still. Conditions are still ideal for mice to breed. Conditions are just right for them.

“A mature female can breed every three weeks, they can pump them out. And that’s what is going on, it is building up to a massive plague.”

Đại thử do thiên, tiểu thử do người.

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Chuột không túi:

Three hospital patients bitten as mouse plague sweeps western NSW
https://www.theguardian.com/australi...ps-western-nsw

Chuột rô-ti nè.

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Toàn dân nghe chăng
Sân nhà nguy biến
Nhện thù đằng đằng
Biên thủy rung chuyển...


swarms of spiders flee into homes – and up legs – to escape NSW floods
https://www.theguardian.com/environm...ape-nsw-floods

​Macksville resident Melanie Williams was also shocked by a swarm of spiders climbing the outer wall of her home as they fled for higher ground. “I occasionally see spiders around the place but never anything like that, it was just insane,” she told the ABC.

The spiders outside her home were “horrific” but her neighbour told her there were twice as many inside his garage, she told Guardian Australia.

Lovenfosse said he had witnessed the same phenomenon in a flood 20 years ago this month, when he was seven.People would be happy if the rain helped end NSW’s ongoing mouse plague, but experts say that is uncertain.“It’s a bit of a tough one to predict,” a CSIRO research officer, Steve Henry, said.

“Certainly areas west of the divide are not getting nearly the same amount of rain as places to the east are getting. Unless we’re getting rainfall of a magnitude that will fill the [mice] burrows with water, we don’t think it will have a significant effect.”

For example, the 86mm of rain reported over the weekend at Gilgandra was a good fall but “unless it’s enough rain to flood out burrows, they’re just going to hunker down, wait for the rain to pass and be back in business”.

Rain would “make conditions less favourable for mice”, Henry said, but “whether this is the precursor [to the end of the plague] is uncertain, unfortunately.”

When floods did kill off mice, it usually happened quickly. “Farmers talk about the mice disappearing virtually overnight,” the research officer said. “They get to such high numbers they become quite stressed … they start to run out of food, which facilitates the spread of disease, they start eating the sick ones, they turn on the babies, and then it’s all over. It’s quite a grizzly story.”

Mấy tụi nhền nhện thì làm món gì?

- nhện: từ chữ ARAIGNÉE tring tiếng Tây

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El condor pasa: I'd rather be a condor than a snail....

Endangered condors return to northern California skies after nearly a century
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...ed-yurok-tribe

The condor once soared from British Columbia to Mexico, but habitat loss, overhunting and, most significantly, poisoning from hunting ammunition drove the birds to near extinction.By the early 1980s, these threats had caused such a precipitous decline in the population that only 22 remained in the wild. In an effort to regrow their numbers, biologists captured the remaining birds and began a breeding program.

Since then, the condor has been reintroduced to south and central California. Its population has expanded into parts of Utah, Arizona and Baja California in Mexico, with experts estimating the number of free flying birds at more than 300.

Now, the bird will be reintroduced in northern California. The reintroduction efforts there have largely been led by the Yurok Tribe, whose ancestral land encompasses large swaths of forest and coastline in northern California and parts of Redwood national park that were once home to the condor.

The tribe has planned for the bird’s return for over a decade, and its proposal was accepted on 24 March by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

For the Yurok people, the return of the condor presents a milestone. The condor plays a critical role in the people’s tradition and culture, and the return of the bird to ancestral territory brings with it a sense of renewal for both people and the land, said Tiana Williams-Claussen, the director of Yurok Tribe’s wildlife department.

In 2003, the Yurok elder community identified the bird as the single-most important land animal to bring back to ancestral land. The reintroduction program was born only a few years after that decision, according to Williams-Claussen.

“When I actually see a condor in the sky again,” Williams-Claussen said, “it’s just mending that wound that was carried by my elders, is carried by me and that, at least in part, is not going to be carried by my children.”

Trăm năm trong cõi trần gian
Chữ người chữ thú cũng cần giúp nhau

[Triển]

Mấy tụi nhền nhện thì làm món gì?

đem chiên bưa liền...

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Giun sán...g:

Glow-worms
https://www.theguardian.com/environm...they-blink-off

Outside at the restaurant, I see my first glow-worms. It is possible that they are fireflies, but they’re still: on the branches of what I hope are hibiscus trees, but then again, I would happily plant a hibiscus in every memory I have.

I had read about them in James and the Giant Peach. The centipede tells James, “Glow-worms are never worms. They are simply lady fireflies without wings.”

“Never worms” is what they are like; you’re not sure of what you’ve seen, they pulse so strangely and each configuration of lit-up worms is so different from the last – so unlike stars, or fairy lights or candles. As soon as you think you’ve seen them, they blink off. As soon as you’re sure you imagined them, on they go again.

Glow-worms are, of course, quite ugly. And being insects, their lives are harrowing and strange in the way only insects’ lives can be. Europe’s common glow-worm injects poison into slugs and snails, liquifying the – why yes, I am prepared to use this term – slug/snail meat. Wikipedia describes it as a “brown broth that the larva can lap up”. The poison doesn’t kill the prey, and sometimes they just slide away.

In New Zealand, there are caves filled with glow-worms patrolling thin strings of goo decorated with fine droplets. These droplets catch midges, which the glow-worms eat. They need to eat a lot, because the glow-worms eventually transform into “primitive flies” – fungus gnats – whose mouth parts don’t function, which means they are unable to eat anything at all.

The flies are a kind of purgatory stage of the insect – a hungry ghost, a lost soul – and then they mate and enter the afterlife.

Glow-worms, fireflies and lightning bugs remind me of thinking, memory and writing. There is the way an idea will appear seemingly by itself, and vanish if you don’t record it. The jump from one scene in your mind to another that “can communicate before it is understood”.

The glow-worms laying down their sticky traps: early sentences ready to catch the perfect word – a gnat suspended in a droplet – to reel it in, chew it up, and start again. Is there another gnat, a better gnat?

And yes, desire and distraction. All the glow-worms in England – “Ye country comets, that portend / No war nor prince’s funeral” – couldn’t help a lovestruck Andrew Marvell 400 years ago.

Như con giun sáng trên trời, như trăng sao vời vợi, làm sao nói được loài giun...
(Phạm Giuy)

[XXG]

Như con giun sáng trên trời, như trăng sao vời vợi, làm sao nói được loài giun..(Phạm Giuy).

Làm sao thấu hiểu được loài giun?
Có nghĩa gì đâu tật thích bùn
Cứ thế vọc lên
............. trầy với trét
Để rồi ướt nhẹp, đứng run run

(Phạm Xô]

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Giun mà đứng chắc xài chân giả.

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Tìm chim như thể tìm ma:

The $10,000 search for New Zealand's 'ghost' bird
https://www.theguardian.com/environm...ghost-bird-aoe

Spurred on by the successful recovery of the North Island kōkako – a large, long-legged songbird with a blue wattle and haunting call – they are searching the South Island for its close relative, though many already believe it to be lost.

Kõkako were widespread in New Zealand’s ancient forests and known for their squirrel-like movement, hopping and leaping between trees. But their numbers plummeted after human settlement due to predation by introduced species.

Now the North Island kõkako survives in low (if increasing) numbers while the South Island species – almost identical but for its orange wattle – is widely assumed extinct. But one band of devotees is refusing to give up hope.

In 1977, ecologist Rhys Buckingham heard a “staggeringly beautiful” bird call in Fiordland that he was certain was that of the South Island kõkako – sparking a 40-plus year mission. With fellow conversationists Ron Nilsson and Nigel Babbage, in 2010 Buckingham co-founded the South Island Kõkako Charitable Trust to expand the search.

Still without certainty, the trust has found sponsorship to offer a substantial reward: $10,000 (£5,122) for conclusive evidence that the bird exists.

Its wild west-style posters show the South Island kõkako in profile, looking every bit a masked bandit beneath the woodcut font: “Wanted: Preferably alive”. These are displayed in DOC-managed visitor centres and huts, rural shops and pubs, tramping and hunting clubs, and conservation groups.

The search has been enhanced by tech, with artificial intelligence used to identify individual species from photos and sound recordings of possible habitat.

From a speaker, solar panel, bike battery and smartphone (“a Heath Robinson get-up,” says Perkins), one trustee built a device that plays the call of the North Island bird at dawn and dusk, and records any response. It has been planted in the Grey Valley, south of Reefton – a hotspot for reports.

Nghĩ điều trời thẳm vực sâu
Bóng chim tăm cá biết đâu mà tìm
(Kokakiều Truyện)

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Khỉ xút chuồng chạy rông:

Monkeys thought to have escaped private collection on loose in Cincinnati
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/08/monkeys-cincinnati-on-loose-ohio-private-collector

At least five monkeys are on the loose in Cincinnati after being spotted swinging from the trees in a graveyard in the Ohio city’s West Side neighborhood.

Police told the local Fox 19 Now television channel that the animals may have escaped from a private exotic animal collector’s home.
In 2011 large numbers of exotic animals escaped a preserve in Zanesville in the state. Local officials eventually gave up trying to capture most of them – which included tigers and bears – and opened fire.

In the end 49 animals were shot, including 18 Bengal tigers, 17 lions, six black bears, two grizzly bears, three mountain lions, two wolves and a baboon. The massacre sparked widespread outrage.

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