Fewer monarch butterflies wintering in Mexico

The HoustonChronicle reports on the decline of Monarch Butterflies expected this year:

The number of monarch butterflies wintering in Mexico has declined by 75 percent this year, and some researchers warned Thursday that conditions in this country as well as in the United States and Canada threaten the survival of one of nature's great wonders.

"We're getting to what we see as a really dangerous situation for the future of the monarch," said Lincoln Brower, a biologist at Sweet Briar College in Virginia and a leading butterfly expert.

Each year, millions of monarchs make a remarkable journey of up to 2,500 miles from Canada and the United States to a remote, mountainous area in the central Mexican state of Michoacan where they spend the winter. The butterflies attract thousands of tourists.

Mexico's Environment Ministry issued a statement this week that blamed the population decline on unseasonably cold weather last spring and summer in North America and on increased use of genetically modified crops and herbicides there. But a report, put out Thursday by Brower and other leading monarch researchers, said the U.S. and Canadian factors merely exacerbated the menace posed by continuing deforestation in the Michoacan mountains.

Jeffrey Glassberg, the president of the North American Butterfly Association, pointed out that insect populations can rise and fall by 50 percent or more from year to year. One bad year does not necessarily make for a species-threatening trend, he said. "Monarchs are not in any threat of extinction," Glassberg said. "With a one-time event like this, without more information, one can only speculate what the cause might be."

The monarchs' migration from the northern United States and Canada each fall and back again in the spring constitutes one of the most dramatic journeys of its kind in nature. Leaving their summer grounds at the end of August, the insects fly as many as 2,500 miles and arrive by early November in Mexico at a five-acre patch of pine-covered mountainside. The monarchs spend the winter clustered by the thousands in pods hanging from tree branches. They head north again in early March. By the time they reach their summer grounds, where they breed and die, some of them will have traveled more than 5,000 miles in all.

US-23 projects aim to enhance pedestrian travel

The Oscoda Press carries this article on the expansion of the pedestrian walkways and bicycle path -- all planned for completion this summer:

Pedestrians will be the ultimate winners of two US-23 corridor construction projects scheduled this year in AuSable Township: rehabilitation of a bridge and extension of a walkway. Once complete, the mouth of the AuSable River will be linked to the Oscoda business district by an unbroken pedestrian/bicycle path.

The US-23 bridge project is tentatively scheduled to start on April 18. If all goes as planned, work will be completed prior to July 29, with crews to suspend construction on holiday weekends. From the river, crews will replace the pins and hangers which form the joints. The bridge steel will be painted ‘harbor blue' to blend in better with the environment. The existing bridge rails will be replaced with four-foot high see-through ornamental aluminum fencing, also painted ‘harbor blue.' This will be more aesthetically pleasing than the existing rails, the engineer said. The most substantial change will be the creation of a six to eight-foot walkway on the east side of the bridge and approaches, to be separated from traffic lanes by a 3½-foot high aluminum rail.

The second project is being undertaken by AuSable Township and will join the existing US-23 walkway to the sidewalk system in neighboring Oscoda Township. Work on the 600-foot extension is expected to begin once frost is out of the ground.

Lumbering: Wet hogs and jammed logs

The Daily News serving Greenville, Belding and Montcalm Counties has this history of logging in the North areas:

The pine country north of Saginaw Bay to the Straights of Mackinac, between Lake Huron, forms a contrast to the Saginaw Valley type of logging. While the Saginaw Valley streams were gently flowing streams, the streams north were tortuous with waterfalls and large boulders. The Rifle, Au Sable and Thunder Bay were all rivers with fast currents and sharp curves. The Black, Pigeon and Sturgeon rivers had special difficulties and dams. The Lumberman's Memorial on the Au Sable River is a monument to the loggers' daring exploits on this river.

The bays around Lake Huron made excellent booming areas. The bays allowed sorting areas for many logs that entered the river, leaving the main river open for logs to continue downriver to other millponds and sawmills.

With the bays being used for holding areas for logs, it left the main river open for the many river tugboats that operated in the area. River tugs were always pulling logs upriver or downriver to different sawmills.

The Tawas City boom had a six-acre holding area for sorting logs. All logs were sorted by log mark. Each log mark had its own holding pen. The pens were floating log enclosures, four sided with one end that could be opened to allow logs in.

Between the holding pens was a channel that the logs were moved down and into a holding pen.

At the Black River Village, a mast and spar industry was started in 1868. This company became the world's largest, supplying New York, Boston and other seaport towns with the best boat mast and spars in the world.

A large log storage area boom was located at Alpena. The sawmill was located on an island in the middle of the Thunder Bay River.

On Burt, Mullet and Black lakes, many booms were located. Some were sorting booms while others were holding booms, which held the logs from going any farther downriver. A holding boom was a number of logs chained together, end to end, which went from one side of the river to the other side.

The more daring souls used this boom bridge to get to one side or the other of the river.

There's more -- read the whole article if you get a chance.

Cleanup continues where train derailed

The Bay City Times reports on the train derailment and bridge collapse that occured last Friday with further information provided by the Iosco News:

Cleanup continued Monday at the scene of a train accident that caused a railroad bridge to fall into the lower Au Sable River. "The bridge is currently in the process of being dismantled and cranes are en route or already there to remove it," said Lyle Tolfree, assistant controller for the Lake State Railway Co.

According to Will Gamble, Lake State Railway vice president of operations, the 44-car freight train was enroute to Bay City from Alpena, traveling at the maximum speed of 10 miles per hour, which he says was verified from the train's black box. When the train moved along the track between Loud Drive and F-41 in Oscoda, the tenth car from the rear jumped the rail. Preliminary analysis by Lake State determined that the derailed car, as it was pulled across the 150-foot river span, caught the corner of a steel girder, shoving the structure forward and off the corner of the concrete abutment. Then, Gamble said, the weight of the twisting car pulled the entire structure down to the river below, breaking it in half except for the rails.

When the trestle was built in 1913, it was designed to hold three times the weight of the company's heaviest steam locomotive. Although car weights have significantly increased since then, a fully loaded car is still below the century-old design capacity, he said. As for the damaged bridge, Gamble says the company will repair it. The 100-year-old bridge spanned the Au Sable River just west of Oscoda.

The railroad bridge is a total loss and must be replaced with a new structure, he said. Tolfree declined to give a cost estimate of the damage. A Wisconsin company that specializes in bridges is shipping a new bridge to the site this week. The company told railroad officials they could have the span operational by as soon as this weekend. Tolfree said Lake State is working with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and the Department of Natural Resources at the site to protect the river as the bridge project moves forward.

The derailment blocked the river for two days, preventing the passage of boats with anglers, fishing for steelhead.

Notes from the February 5, 2005 Board Meeting

The Board of Directors met last Saturday, February 5 to review 2004 expenditures and plan for ongoing operating expenses for 2005. Kirk presented the financial review and highlighted these points:

Snow removal, lawn care, and insurance are the largest expense items we have to plan for and represent over 80% of the annual operating expense.

For 2005 we are planning zero growth in snow removal and lawn care while Insurance will increase 5%.

We have one new item to plan for and that is the chemical cost for the sprinkler system. 2005 will be the first full year of operation of the new pump.

There are no significant projects planned for 2005.

Dues were last raised in 1997 (8 years ago) and based upon the above planned expenditures the Board feels that current dues income will be satisfactory to accommodate the planned increases in 2005 operating expenses; i.e., no increase is planned for 2005.

As called for in our masterdeed (Article II, Section C, Paragraph #1) the Board is required to establish a reserve fund for maintenance, repairs and replacement. The minimum dollar value of the account is set to an amount that if a major problem occurred such as; a failure in the septic system, new roofs or a sink hole in the parking lot, we would need up-front funds to get the project started. This up-front money would come from the reserve account and it would be replaced by a special assessment.

At this meeting the Board reviewed and agreed to the minimum funding level of the reserve account. Comparing maintenance expenses over the past ten years, the board of directors feels that this amount should be sufficient. The reserve account is presently sitting at this floor amount. Any maintenance expenses that cause the account to fall below this floor will be made up by special assessments to each owner during the 4rth quarter. Presently there are no 2005 projects which would cause money to be withdrawn from the account. Therefore, there is no special assessment anticipated for 2005. However, it is still early in the year.

Ice sheets put a lid on lake-effect snowfall

The Chicago Tribune (subscription required) carried this article on the current lake conditions:

February is the month when the spread of the winter ice packs reaches its farthest extent, forming a cap that--if wide enough--can prevent water from evaporating from the lake surface, condensing in winter winds and falling onshore as snow. The more ice on the lake, the less lake-effect snow.

And as scientists, runners, and weather watchers have pointed out last week, the ice this year is prodigious, even when compared to winters past. Meteorologists say it is thick enough to survive even the current warm spell.

From Waukegan to Gary, a vast, 60-mile plain a few inches to a foot thick has appeared along the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan. Shorelines along the rest of the Great Lakes have also frozen over, forming 800 nearly continuous miles of ice between Duluth, Minn., and Sackets Harbor, N.Y.

"It's a little more than normal. Traditionally, this time of year you don't get a lot of ice in the southern basin of Lake Michigan," said Raymond Assel, a physical scientist at the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor.

Green Bay is frozen solid enough (theoretically) for trucks to drive from the Wisconsin city as far as Menominee in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. In Lake Superior, Thunder Bay is a bay no more; now it is a broad field of ice nearly 2 feet thick. You could walk nearly all the way from Forestville, Mich., across Lake Huron to Goderich, Ontario. All of Lake Ontario's shores are iced in. There is no open water on Lake Erie, the shallowest of the Great Lakes.

Historically, the deepest part of the winter freeze has yet to descend on the Great Lakes, Assel said. That comes at the end of February or the beginning of March. Those hoping to escape the winter without more shoveling would do well to hope for a sustained cold snap.

Tests confirm cougar in Upper Peninsula

The Detroit Free Press has this article on mounting evidence that cougars live in Michigan:

DNA testing has confirmed that a large cat struck by a vehicle last year was a cougar, but it remains unclear whether Michigan has an established population of wildcats, a state wildlife official said Thursday. A motorist reported hitting "a large cat" in southern Menominee County on November 2, 2004. The driver turned over hair samples collected from the bumper to biologists at the Michigan Department of Natural Resources field office in Escanaba.

"This is exactly the kind of information we are looking for to gain a better understanding of what animals are present in Michigan and identify potential areas for additional work," said Ray Rustem, the DNR's natural heritage unit supervisor. Even so, he said, the test result "still does not confirm the presence of a breeding population in Michigan."

Additional information is available at the Michigan Wildlife Conservancy web site. Evidence of cougars have appeared in these NE Michigan Counties: Alpena, Alcoma, Montmorency, Oscoda, and Roscommon.