Her book has a clever cover design showing what looks like a law enforcement patch with different animals and tress depicted inside the border. Prominently placed in the center is a bear who is going through a trash can. This fits the sub-title of the book: "When nature breaks the law." And often leaves a mess behind.
Each chapter sees Mary telling us about a different locale and particular animal, or plant problem. I'm sure no one suspected that their garden azaleas and rhododendrons (they're in the same family) are poisonous.
We probably don't know they're poisonous because Agatha Christie never chose to have someone bumped off with an azalea or rhododendron. Castor beans and ricin, which get their fair attention in Ms. Roach's book, are the source of organic death. Go green when you kill.
Certainly we see and experience animals as a nuisance and sometimes a danger. But what about that tall leafy thing in your yard that provides shade and leaves to rake in the fall when you're wearing a flannel shirt? Ms. Roach tells us in Chapter 7, "When the Wood Comes Down; Beware the Danger Tree"
"What a Douglas fir does it does very, very slowly, and that includes dying. Possibly the least attractive feature of a nine-hundred year life span is the century or two spent dying...Because if it falls, anyone it lands on will spend a very, very short time dying."
I doubt a decaying tree will ever be used to provide a quick death in a death sentence, but trees are dangerous when they're wounded. We had a fairly large maple in the backyard when we moved into the house we're in now. Maples are nice. They have large leaves that turn nice colors in the fall. They put on a show, especially if there are a lot of them.
Maples are also very shallow rooted, and topple easily when the ground is very wet and there is a fair amount of wind. The large leaves act as a resistance to the wind, and down comes tree, boughs and all.
But before this main event occurs, a maple, or any tree, can decide to let branches loose and let gravity do the rest. No problem, so long as you or something you might like to keep, like a car, is not the way of the falling branch.
The maple we had on occasion would drop a good size branch here and there and put a mighty dent in the deck. This was a "Danger Tree" that we eventually had removed. We replaced it with a nice Zelkova in nearly the same spot. The yard is safe again.
Bears, elephants, monkeys, cougars, gophers, snipes, rats, mice, deer, geese, all get their day in Mary's sun. Animals we know have a heightened sense of smell to help them to react to predators in their midst before the predator gets them. What I never knew is that we as humans can mimic their smell tracking techniques.
And we know dogs can track scents very well, be it that of another animal, or an escaped inmate. The fairly recent jail break from Dannemora prison in upstate New York in 2015 saw a massive manhunt through the woods using police and hounds.
The escapees knew something about being tracked because they would spread pepper on the trail they had just walked on. Pepper sets off a fit of sneezing for the hounds, and they lose the scent. But not permanently. The dogs are trained to start sniffing in a "zigzag, sweeping wide left and right until they pick it up again."
Ms. Roach mimics this technique when a "young man passed by in a reek of Axe body spray. I let him turn the corner and disappear from view, then waited a few minutes. By zigzagging hound dog-style, I was able to track him to his destinations, a cheesesteak place on the next block."
Holy crap! I use Axe body spray, (Don't ask which one. I get a 12 pack every now and then from Amazon and pay no attention to the marketing name they've attached to the product.) but hopefully not in the proportions that Mary's young man did. He must have really sprayed himself down. My own application must be more modest because I've never seen a posse of neighborhood cats walking behind me.
Lesson learned: if you're an escaped inmate who's on the run, bring pepper and forget the deodorant. With luck, you might make it to freedom.
Ms. Roach is a science writer, but not someone who uses heavy scientific jargon. There are sometimes lengthy footnotes which are quite informative. In a section on how to humanly eradicate (kill) rats and mice, there once was a device that lured them into a trap that saw a guillotine blade come sliding down. The New York Post would have written the headline "Headless rat found toppled over."
The device is no longer being made, but a used one can be found on eBay with luck. Mary's suggestion is if you're selling your "small animal guillotine for God's sake clean the blade before you take the picture." There is great advice in this book.
One of my favorite sections is Ms. Roach's trip to the Vatican, that City State nestled within Rome that had a serious problem with gulls descending on the outdoor altar in St. Peter's Square and laying waste to a massive display of daffodils in 2017 on the eve of Easter Mass. Lasers are brought in for the next day's display to dissuade the gulls from dive-bombing the flowers, flowers they don't even eat, but are instead interested in looking for worms in the soil. The lasers work, and the gulls are lulled to sleep.
Ms. Roach doesn't get an audience with the pope, but her credentials do qualify her for an audience with "the Vatican Director of Gardens and Garbage." She is quite interested in how the church sees the attempted eradication of one of God's creatures, the rat. After all, Pope Francis is influenced by St. Francis of Assisi, "the humble, nature-besotted Capuchin."
Chapter 13, "The Jesuit and the Rat; Wildlife Management Tips from the Pontifical Academy for Life." Ms. Roach's views and reactions to a rat in her midst are forever changed by the spiritual contemplation she comes away with.
I'm not however convinced she might not have a different viewpoint if one starts coming up to her on a NYC subway platform.
http://onofframp.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment