 Non-denominational waterfowl feeding.
I went out last week hoping to see the Orthodox Jews throwing their leavened bread at the Prospect Park geese before Passover. The Prospect Park Alliance publicly notified them not to try to foist off their chametz on the waterfowl feeding. That ticked off the community, who denied any such plans., to the New York Times and the Brooklyn Paper.
So I headed over to the prime duck-feeding spot on the lake in Prospect Park on both the eve and morning of Passover. Let’s be honest, I was hoping for a spectacle: maybe 10 guys in 5 kinds of fur hats, surrounded by their collective 87 children and 10 wives in perfect wigs, all hurling bags of bread at grateful Canada geese. The aggressive swan family that lives there might charge them. A Park Slope mom might passive-aggressively read the sign about not feeding the waterfowl outloud to her kids. The pushy Peking ducks that follow bird feeders away from the lake might try to follow these generous Jews all the way home to Borough Park.
Instead I got absolutely no visible Hasidim at the spot where people and ducks have come to agree is the best spot for feeding, the southwest corner of the lake. (I also looked around the shore and by the boathouse.)
That’s not to say I didn’t see plenty of visibly Orthodox Jews feeding ducks earlier this spring. Sometimes there were even two men in formal garb. But mostly, just
Keep reading Trip to see Orthodox Jews in Pre-Passover duck-feeding frenzy a big disappointment
 Can you not stand sitting feet away from amusing hummingbirds as they steal sweet nectar from your feeder? Inventor Doyle Doss solved the age-old problem by devising a red face shield that serves the sugar water from a tube between your eyes. Since 2008 he says he’s sold about 700 of these. So while people may be freaked out to see one, hummingbirds may actually begin to recognize what they are and come right over.
Doss has some serious, boring inventions and then a side-line in goofy stuff like the face feeder, which he came up with after a hummingbird hovered in front of his red bird. “A hummingbird came out of nowhere and just hung there, two inches from my nose,” he says. “My immediate response was, I froze. I never forgot the experience. It was such a magical type of thing.”
Decades later, Doss took a professional welding face shield and covered it in a red pattern that hummers love. Then he put a rubber tube between the eyes to be filled with sugar water. The birds came. This isn’t the first attempt at a hummingbird helmet. This adorable video shows a little girl watching hummingbirds in the more popular variety–and initially flinching and scaring them away.
The face shield serves to draw hummers in (they love red) and to make humans confident they won’t get their eyes poked out. Hummingbirds are so agile, they’re not going to go bumbling into your face.
Doss says the tube was the hardest part to figure
Keep reading 700 Helmet hummingbird feeders floating around North America
 AZ company invents high-tech taser for attacking grizzlies; shoots 35 feet. TN and AL get new crayfish species.
Keep reading Wildlife taser; DC keeps adorable pandas & a tour of other animal news
 German loves Heidi, a cross-eyed North American possum. Gulf of Mexico has new species: pink meanie jellyfish. Parrot does math for seeds. Manatees huddle in fake warmth.
Keep reading Squinty possum, Pink Meanie jellyfish, Manatees at heater and a tour of other animal news.
 Two wolves from the center were released, then shot within months. The whole program has effectively been on hold for almost five years. Just last week the Fish and Wildlife Service announced it wouldn’t release any wolves this year — without any real explanation. while federal and state wildlife debate what to do. (The states involved, Arizona and New Mexico, seem to also be locked in a battle over who can be more inhospitable to wolves.) So far the program has released 92 wolves into the wild on the Arizona-New Mexico border. But since 2006, they’ve only released one–despite continued illegal hunting of the wolves. Since 1998, there have been 75 documented wolf deaths. People who presumably don’t like the federal intrusion of wolves introduced to cattle country shot 32 endangered Mexican gray wolves. Twelve were hit by cars. Only 10 were confirmed natural causes; the rest are under investigation.
Keep reading Half as Many Mexican Wolves in NY Suburb as in Wild
 Fake or vegan civet coffee would be great news for civets. Wild civets used to process the coffee for farmers, but demand is too great for this serendipitous civet coffee. Civets are getting rarer in the wild and more common on grim civet farms.
Keep reading Looking for Vegan Civet Coffee?
 Even USDA data shows meat consumption actually shrinking in the last few years, both here and abroad. The typical U.S. household at 43 kilograms of beef a year in 2006, but has cut back to 39.3 kg–a 9% decrease.
Keep reading World Will Either Need 2x as Much Meat by 2050 or We Could Eat a Little Less
The grizzly bear committee report mainly just takes on a strawman claim that whitebark pine decline=grizzly decline. That’s not what the Times said. The agency’s report really doesn’t refute the real claim, whitebark pine decline=grizzly conflict increase. It just says it’s not the biggest factor.
Keep reading Does Whitebark Pine Decline = Increased Grizzly Attacks?
American zoos frown on feeding the animals, but the Nanning Zoo in China isn’t so persnickety. Visitors feed their carp bananas by hand.
What I can make out from on online translation of the zoo’s story: people in Guangxi got some bad bananas, so naturally they brought them to the zoo. And, of course, the zoo didn’t mind people giving the fruit to the monkeys and hornbills. Then, almost inevitably, somebody fed them to the gold fish. And now, as long as you peel the bananas, the carp think of them as a treat.
And it seems to be cultural: only this one pool of fish like bananas. There’s another pool in the zoo with the same kind of fish but they have “no enthusiasm on the banana.”
To see more animals go to animaltourism.com
 We’ve just had a couple big foot chefs–Alice Waters and Scott Boswell– shun shark fin soup, but a quick check around shows it’s still common in most American cities. Shame works when a celebrity chef gets linked with shark finning, the hideous way fins are hacked off a live shark, which is then thrown back to die, decimating shark populations worldwide. But what about the 56 restaurants in New York City that still serve shark fin? Or San Francisco’s 69 shark fin restaurants?
A search on New York Magazine‘s Menu Pages reveals how easy it is to find shark fin soup around the country. New York City has 56 restaurants serving shark fin. 35 restaurants serve shark fin soup. Three are vegetarian–meaning it’s mock shark fin soup.
Not surprisingly, the biggest hunk–20–are in Chinatown.But they’re all over the city, not just in restaurants only frequented by Chinese diners. Shanghai, near Macy’s, serves five versions ranging from $33-$41. The Upper East Side’s Our Place has a bowl for $12. A place near China Town sells it by the quart for take-out. >In Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, East Harbor Seafood Palace features a whole shark-fin soup category on its menu, with options from $55-$75.
San Francisco: 69 restaurants serving shark fin, 4 vegetarian Los Angeles: 31 shark fin-serving restaurants. (The swanky Mr. Chow in Beverly Hills has imitation shark. Pacific Coast Highway Chinese Restaurant has a whole menu division of the real thing.) Philadelphia: 11 shark fin purveyors, 4 vegetarian Boston:
Keep reading Top Chefs Shun Shark Fin Soup, But You Can Still Get it Anyway
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