I still remember the year I set up a bird feeding station for ravens and eagles. I put the bones and offal from a moose I shot out in the front yard. We had hours of entertainment watching the birds feed...oh, wait...Alaska is different. Sowwy!
Not different at all. Moose and eagles and hawks share our space here, too. Did the eagles share? I was recently surprised to see two eagles eating a dead critter that had been hit on the side of the road. It occurred to me I'd never seen two feeding together. Maybe one was a juvenile.
Eagles do indeed feed in groups, they are actually scavengers. I have also seen ravens drive the eagles off of a "feeder". I thought it would be a more efficient use of things that would otherwise be wasted. And, it was cheap entertainment for the cats. All of them were perched in the upstairs windows, chittering like they do when they see a sparrow. It was challenging not to let them out to find out just what they were challenging.
When I lived and worked in sunny Sarasota, Florida, one of my projects was at a municipal landfill. That's environmental engineering for 'town dump'.
My part of the project was to accurately map the landfill. Later, my maps and drawings were used to design and install a cap that would lock in place, then gather and extract methane gas. That gas then provided the power for an industrial park.
Every day the landfill was covered with seagulls. It was a dump and it was just a few miles from the Gulf of Mexico.
The gulls spent the majority of their time gleaning the trash for food. Until one of the pair of eagles nesting nearby wanted to stretch their wings. These eagles would swoop down out of the sun as if they were Spitfires closing in on Messerschmidts. The gulls would fly off the dump as if you opened the zipper on a very tight fitting gray and white sweater. They just peeled away from the flight path of the eagles.
Those gulls knew who could be there to feast and those who might be feasted upon.
Years ago, a friend of mine got a (much coveted) permit to visit an eagle viewing site in Alaska. She was an amateur photographer and was excited about the potential. Her most potent photos featured an eagle attacking and eating a gull, while the gull was still alive!
How, or what, does one map at a landfill? I've seen the methane caps and there's a building that has plumbing for the methane emissions.
Sarasota is billiard table flat. A bump down there could be described as "Mount Nosmo".
I used good old survey technique first laying out and measuring a control system that ringed the dump. Then I measured the height of the mound. We established a benchmark. That's a point with a known elevation. We ran vertical control over the mound, checking back in to the benchmark. That keeps out height measurements precise.
When you put the horizontal data (the control lines ringing the dump) together with the vertical data (the change in elevation of the dump) we could accurately assemble a contour map of the site and then design the right size cap.
After that, the engineering of all the piping was given to me so I could determine where it all went and if it would actually fit.
I know that environmental engineering sound like all bright lights and glamor. But I've worked in dumps, in sewers, in pits that contained leaking underground storage tanks, seeking out asbestos containing building materials, lead-based paint, leaking electrical transformers and hazardous waste sites.
Through it all, I've miraculously maintained my health.
My family business is a print shop. My Great Grandfather started it in 1921, just a few years after he got off the boat from Dundee, Scotland. My baby brother (who celebrated his 56th birthday in July) owns and operates the shop today. Pop ran the Linotype machine. It's been obsolete since the Eisenhower administration, but the week Pop retired in 1997, they dismantled it and shipped it off for scrap.
The Linotype took an ingot of lead, melted it down and then injected that molten lead into type face molds a line at a time. If everything didn't 'line up' right, a stream of molten lead could squirt out of the machine. Pop caught that lead on his trousers. From the knee to the cuff, Pop's gabardines would sport little flecks of lead.
Pop would come home to a tumultuous greeting from my brother and me! We would hug him around his legs (because we weren't yet tall enough to reach any higher) he would roll around the living room floor and rough house with us. On laundry day, Mom would wash all our clothes together. She would iron his trousers and keep that hot iron over the flecks of lead to soften them and pick them away with her finger nails.
Then I grew up, went to The Ohio State University and earned a degree in environmental engineering. During my matriculation there, I learned how hazardous lead exposure is, particuarly to growing children. The most deleterious effect is one on the central nervous system and its ability to perform complex cognitive tasks. It basically wipes IQ points from your brain.
"Pop" I bravely proclaimed "All that lead you brought home dumbed me down! I could have been born daVinci or Einstein! But now I have to use what brain cells I have left that weren't destroyed by Linotype lead!"
Pop looked over the top of his spectacles and dryly said "You give yourself too much credit."
I am so dreading the cold and the snow.
