August 8, 2003
Air Date: August 8, 2003
FULL SHOW
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Space Junk
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Spent rocket stages and broken lens caps are just some of the junk littering Earth’s orbit, posing serious environmental and safety hazards. Host Steve Curwood talks with Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Observatory and contributing editor for Sky and Telescope magazine, about the dangers of littering in the final frontier. (06:30)
Comfy Camping
/ Robin WhiteView the page for this story
Americans are so pinched for time and so stressed, camping is suddenly too much work. Maybe we're just getting lazier. Robin White reports on the blurring line between camping and the spa vacation. (05:00)
Environmental Health Note/Airport Noise
/ Diane ToomeyView the page for this story
Living on Earth’s Diane Toomey reports on a new study that shows children living near airports may have impaired reading and memory ability. (01:20)
Almanac/Merzbacher Lake
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This week, we have facts about Merzbacher Lake in Kyrgyzstan. This glacial lake was discovered 100 years ago and just about every year since its icy dam has broken and released a deluge in the valleys below. (01:30)
Filtering Seawater
/ Eric AndersonView the page for this story
Shrinking supplies of fresh water combined with new advances in technology are making California officials take another look at seawater desalination. Eric Anderson reports from KPBS in San Diego. (06:00)
Skulls and Bones
/ Rosemary HobanView the page for this story
Bones are repositories of history. But beachcomber Ray Bandar has been collecting them for forty years for beauty as well as what they reveal. Rosemary Hoban reports from San Francisco that science says thank you to a hobby run amok. (06:00)
Pigeons in the Park
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New York City's Bryant Park is trying a novel way to rid the area of pigeons -- call in the hawk patrols. Host Steve Curwood talks with raptor specialist Tom Cullen about what he and his birds are doing in the park. (03:00)
Emerging Science Note/WTC Fallout
/ Jessica PenneyView the page for this story
Living on Earth’s Jessica Penney reports on how scientists are using the World Trade Center tragedy to study geology in the New York Harbor. (01:20)
Silver Valley
/ Guy HandView the page for this story
In Northern Idaho's Silver Valley mining country, some residents complain the EPA has practically taken up residence. A century of mining waste coats this valley, but some residents believe the health threat is small and wish the EPA would leave. Guy Hand reports. (15:00)
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Show Credits and Funders
Show Transcript
Host: Steve CurwoodGuests: Jonathan McDowell, Tom CullenReporters: Robin White, Erik Anderson, Rose Hoban, Guy HandCommentary: Laura KnoyNotes: Diane Toomey, Jessica Penney
[THEME MUSIC]
CURWOOD: From NPR - this is Living On Earth.
[THEME MUSIC]
I’m Steve Curwood. Two decades ago the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency came to northern Idaho to clean up the aftermath of some big mining operations. At first local residents welcomed the attention of the federal government, but the goodwill didn't last.
BOND: The original EPA guys that came up here to do this cleanup were decent, honorable people. They were good, good people. What you've got now is a bunch of little Gestapo and I would not suggest that anybody not use any means available, constitutionally or otherwise, to oppose them.
CURWOOD: It's the Silver Valley Superfund stigma this week. And we look at the new breed of camping that makes roughing it passe, right down to the chocolates on your bedroll. We'll have those stories and more on Living on Earth, coming up right after this.
[NPR NEWSCAST]
FEMALE ANNOUNCER: Support for Living on Earth comes from the National Science Foundation and Stoneyfield Farm.
Space Junk
CURWOOD: Welcome to an encore edition Living on Earth. I’m Steve Curwood. For decades, probes, satellites and other spacecraft have paved a path for space exploration, orbiting and collecting data from the far reaches of the universe. But in recent years that path has become littered with the trash and other remnants of these missions, posing a serious environmental and safety hazard. Joining me now is Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Observatory and contributing editor for Sky and Telescope Magazine. Welcome.
MCDOWELL: Thank you.
CURWOOD: How much junk is there out in space?
MCDOWELL: Well, there's about 9000 objects that the radars track right now, we know their orbits and so on. But that's only the tip of the iceberg, because there's a lot of smaller stuff that the radars can't see. So we really don't know.
CURWOOD: And how big does it have to be to be dangerous to something like a spacecraft or a satellite?
MCDOWELL: Well, it's quite surprising. Even a rather small piece of junk a few inches across can be nasty. If you imagine that you have something that's only a few ounces, but it's traveling with a head-on collision of 20,000 miles an hour, that's the equivalent energy to being hit on the interstate by a two-ton truck.
CURWOOD: Now, where does all this junk come from?
MCDOWELL: Typically, when people throw things away on space walks, when they lose lens caps off of their camera, stuff like that, when they're on the space station, that reenters pretty quickly. The big problem is from rocket stages that blow up after they've been in orbit for some time. They have a little fuel leftover, they have some fuel and some oxygen, and it's in separate tanks. And after a few years the tanks crack, and the fuel and the oxygen go out on a date together, and so suddenly you have 100 new pieces of space debris. And that's the major contribution. There's also some military weapons tests that have left a bunch of shrapnel in orbit, which contributes to the population.
CURWOOD: Now, what kind of damage can this space debris cause?
MCDOWELL: Well, there was one satellite that we know of so far that's been damaged by space debris. It has its antennae broken off, it stopped working. But you can imagine that if you have a big satellite, like the Hubble telescope, like a space station that's in orbit for a lot of years, its chances of getting a nasty hit are quite large.
The thing that people are most scared of is up in geostationary orbit, where all the television satellites live. And there, even though it's a huge area of space, there are so many satellites that if you destroyed one in a collision you could get a chain reaction, and turn this area of space into a new ring around the earth, like Saturn's rings, but made up of lots of tiny pieces of very expensive television satellite.
CURWOOD: So far we've been talking about remnants of bodies of spacecraft, and accidental releases from operations, but what about plain, old-fashioned trash? How much stuff did people just dump out there from the shuttles, and the space stations, and the earlier trips to space?
MCDOWELL: Well, there's all kinds of trash. And, indeed, on the Mir space station, every few weeks we would see five or six new space debris objects be catalogued, and we eventually discovered that they were putting their trash in plastic bags and shoving them out the airlock. And so, that's happened all through the space program. On the Shuttle to the present day, they don't throw trash overboard, but they do jettison water. But in general, all of that stuff is in low orbit. It doesn't stay up very long, and so it's not a huge problem compared to the exploding rocket stages higher up.
CURWOOD: Now, who is keeping track of all this junk?
MCDOWELL: Well, the US Air Force, and also the Russians, have radars that track the bigger stuff. And they started off because they were worried, in the early days of the Cold War, that you saw things on your radar that might be nuclear missiles attacking the U.S., and so you wanted to make sure that you knew what was space junk and what was missiles. In fact, in the early days in the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Russian Mars probe blew up and the U.S. radar operators saw 20 pieces come on their radar screens. And very quickly the computers figured out that, yes, this was in orbit and it was a piece of space junk that had blown up.
CURWOOD: How much does our design of spacecraft, space systems, contribute to all this junk? Do we just think trash? Are we designing for trash?
MCDOWELL: Well, that certainly used to be the case, and that was the mindset of people in the Cold War, particularly. The space program grew out of the military missile programs, to some extent. And when you first went into space, as for the first time that humans have gone anywhere, you think, wow, this is big, there's no way we can fill this up. And it's true, the distance between your average piece of space junk is about 1000 miles to the next one. But, nevertheless, you're traveling so fast you sweep out a large area, and pretty soon it starts to be a problem.
CURWOOD: So how are we doing, then, with understanding that hey, space is not infinite, that we can't just leave our trash behind.
MCDOWELL: I think there's been huge progress in the past 10 years. The United States and Europe have really taken the lead on this. There's been a number of international conferences deciding what are the sources of space debris, how do we stop making more of them. They began to take counter measures, in particular using up all your rocket fuel and making sure that rocket stages go into lower orbits where they'll reenter quickly, not throwing away your lens cap, putting it on a hinge instead of just jettisoning it.
There's also starting to be ecological concerns about the effects of space rockets during launch, when lower stages of the rockets fall downrange. Now, America launches eastward over the ocean, and our trash from the launch falls in the sea, where it's actually a pretty small effect compared to all the other ways that we foul up our oceans. But in Russia, they've been falling in the desert, and contaminating the water table, and causing health problems in villages. And so there's a move, for instance, to change the design of which fuels you use, so that you don't use nasty stuff like nitrogen tetroxide but clean stuff like hydrogen and oxygen.
But mother nature does give us a hand. The friction with the upper atmosphere – space isn't completely empty, there's a very thin outer atmosphere that brings the satellites down over a period of decades and centuries. And what we have to do is make sure that the rate at which we dirty up things is slow compared to that natural cleaning time scale.
CURWOOD: Jonathan McDowell is an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Observatory and contributing editor for Sky and Telescope Magazine. Thanks for taking this time with me today.
MCDOWELL: Thanks for having me.
Related link:
California Academy of Sciences
Comfy Camping
CURWOOD: It used to be that camping divided the hearty and daring from the shrinking violets. Cold water, latrines, and nights on hard ground were all part of the fun of roughing it. But campground managers say few of us care to go that route anymore. Camping is changing. And there are now luxury campsites that provide all the comforts of home, if your home comes with room service, that is. Robin White has our report on today’s pampered campers.
WHITE: As a backpacker, I had to admit I was skeptical when I heard about Costa Noa. It's a high-end campsite on the spectacular central coast of California. Here, for about 18 times the cost of a Forest Service campsite, you can sleep out under canvas in a luxury escape, with heated mattress pads and a hot tub to sooth your aching muscles. Manager Daniel Medellin says many of his customers are in, what you might call, mixed marriages.
MEDELLIN: We have a lot of couples that have come to visit us where one of the party – and we really can't distinguish whether it was the guy or the gal that wasn't so comfortable with camping. But, there's a happy medium. You get the outdoor experience, and then you're able to enjoy some creature comforts at the same time.
WHITE: Creature comforts like restrooms with heated floors, queen-size beds with down comforters, terrycloth robes, and fancy smelling soaps and shampoos. Outside one tent cabin, some campers who don't usually get close to nature are right now experiencing it firsthand.
[CHIRPING BIRDS]
Where are you from? [TO CAMPER]
MILLER: Marin County.
WHITE: And what's your name?
MILLER: Christine Miller.
WHITE: Okay, Christine…
MILLER: [LAUGHTER IN BACKGROUND] Oh, we've been attacked by birds. Deluxe camping has gone to, like, not so deluxe. We had a dead bird on our doorstep this morning. It's fine.
WHITE: Replete with dead swallows, Costa Noa is the brainchild of Chip Conley. He spotted the exploding market for SUVs in the 1990s. He saw people looking for escape. And, he designed Costa Noa to give them somewhere to escape to.
CONLEY: What we're trying to do is attract the person who can go and experience nature in a new way without having to walk into the office on Monday morning and having red, bloodshot eyes from not having slept all weekend.
[SOUND OF REI STORE]
WHITE: At the huge recreational equipment coop, REI, in Berkley, they're picking up the theme. Annie Irwin shows me around some of the latest products.
IRWIN: There's a tea-for-two table, the blow-up supreme mattress, camp espresso machine. A propane tent heater, put it right in there. Hey, it's just like being in the house, only you're outdoors.
WHITE: There's a hand-crank blender, solar panels for GameBoy on the trail, titanium cook sets, pressure-heated showers, and portable sit-down toilets.
[TO FEMALE CUSTOMER] Can I just show you a couple of things and see if you would ever buy these, and what you think of them?
FEMALE CUSTOMER: Probably not, but you could show me.
WHITE: Right there. That, there, is a hand-cranked blender. Would you ever--
FEMALE CUSTOMER: No way, no way.
WHITE: See this?
MALE CUSTOMER: Yes.
WHITE: It's a hand-crank blender.
MALE CUSTOMER: Unnecessary.
WHITE: Could you ever see using one of those, a propane tent heater?
2ND MALE CUSTOMER: No, I wouldn't see that. No.
WHITE: Well that's what they say now. But they might get caught by the trend. REI says the hand-crank blender is one of their hottest items. An estimated 850 campsites from California to Georgia, offer some sort of luxury service. And they're packed in a year when hotel occupancy is down. Even some KOA campgrounds have organic vegetable stands, web access and wine tasting on Saturday nights.
I had to go try this luxury camping for myself. I grabbed my friend Rob Tufel and we set off to Safari West in Santa Rosa. The promo material calls it "Serengeti in the Wine Country."
[CHIRPING CRICKETS AND RUSTLING PAPER]
TUFEL: Tent camp adventure at Safari West is a deluxe camping experience at a premier safari park located right over the interstate. Safari West is home to over 350 exotic endangered and extinct-in-the-wild, African mammals and birds. Extinct-in-the-wild? Extinct-in-the-wild, all hyphens. Is that correct?
[EXOTIC BIRDS CALLING]
WHITE: In the morning, we woke up to the sight of nine giraffes wandering across the field, only 20 feet from our tent cabin. Kelly Verhoeg said it wasn't camping, but she liked it anyway. [TO KELLY VERHOEG] If it's not camping, what is it?
VERHOAG: [LAUGHING] Pretending you're going to Africa. Last night, sitting in the tent cabin, I guess they call it, you know, I was looking at my husband sitting there. And I was like, it's like I'm looking at Ernest Hemingway or something, and we had been taken back in time. And, you know, this is kind of how you would picture it.
WHITE: Well, he didn't look like the big game-hunting author, Ernest Hemingway, to me. But who am I to spoil the fun? For Living on Earth, I'm Robin White at Safari West.
[MUSIC: The Boo Radleys “There She Goes” So I Married An Axe Murderer [Soundtrack] Sony (1993)]
Related links:
- Space.com story on space junk
- SpaceRef.com list of space debris
Environmental Health Note/Airport Noise
CURWOOD: Coming up: an offbeat beachcomber goes hunting for the heads of marine mammals. First, this environmental health note from Diane Toomey.
[MUSIC: HEALTH NOTE THEME]
TOOMEY: In recent years, there has been a move to make nursing home environments more pleasant and healthy by introducing quality of life enhancements. Those improvements include the addition of such things as plants and animals.
Now researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology want to help nursing home residents get a better night's sleep. They studied sleep disruption in 92 nursing homes, and found that when people woke up during the night, almost one-fifth of the time the cause of that disruption was loud noise.
To alleviate the problem, acoustical engineers working in several nursing homes are testing noise reduction technologies. They're hanging sound-absorbing panels in hallway walls, replacing noisy metal curtain hooks with silent ones, and wrapping sound-deadening blankets around motorized equipment.
Researchers are also trying to reduce television noise by imbedding speakers in headboard and bed pillows. The researchers will study the results, and they'll also examine what effect behavioral interventions have on sleep, such as increased daytime activity, and light exposure. Researchers say they think it will take a combination of behavioral and environmental interventions to improve the sleep of nursing home residents. That's this week's health note. I'm Diane Toomey.
[MUSIC]
CURWOOD: And you're listening to Living on Earth.
[MUSIC: Stan Getz “Serenade in Blue” Quiet Now: Body & Soul Verve (2000)]
Almanac/Merzbacher Lake
CURWOOD: Welcome back to Living On Earth. I’m Steve Curwood.
[MUSIC: Neu! “Im Gluck” Neu! Astralwerks (1972)]
One hundred years ago, German explorer Gottfried Merzbacher led an expedition through the Tien Shan Mountains in modern Kyrgyzstan. There, on the western edge of the Himalayas, he discovered a remote glacial lake. In a lengthy chronicle of his travels, he hardly mentions the lake that now bears his name. But he just saw it on the wrong day. Later, visitors learned of its dynamic nature. Almost every year, Merzbacher Lake appears, expands, dies a spectacular death, and is reborn. Its evolution takes place in a steep, virtually inaccessible valley where two glaciers meet. When the spring sun begins to melt the ice, water flows into the valley, collects on top of the glacier's ice, and is penned in by an ice dam.
At the peak of its cycle, the lake has an area of about five square kilometers. But by then it's late summer, the temperature is rising, and like a bottle of fine champagne, a cork of ice pops out from the base of the dam and water bursts free in an icy explosion. In just three days, the lake disappears and the cycle begins again.
Even one hundred years after its discovery, westerners still don't know much about Merzbacher Lake. Scientists are currently investigating the area's geology, and updating Soviet-era maps of the region using satellite images to better understand this natural wonder.
And for this week, that's the Living on Earth Almanac.
[MUSIC]
Filtering Seawater
CURWOOD: Southern California is looking to the ocean to help quench its thirst for fresh water. That’s because it’s becoming cheaper to get the salt out of sea water, as long as you have plenty of power. Desalination is a multi-billion dollar industry that’s already doing a brisk business in the Middle East. Now there is a proposal to build five plants along the Golden State’s southern coast. From member stations KPBS in San Diego, Erik Anderson reports.
[SOUND OF OCEAN WAVES]
ANDERSON: The ocean has long been a tantalizing solution to Southern California's water woes. Filtering seawater was expensive and Colorado River water was cheap. Recently, the bottled water and pharmaceutical industry have driven technological advances in water filtration. San Diego County Water Authority spokesman Bob Yamada says new filters can treat twice as much water with half the energy, and that's dramatically lowering the cost.
YAMADA: As we look out to the future in developing new water supplies, seawater desalination is right on the cusp of being cost competitive with those new water supplies.
ANDERSON: So Southern California water officials are proposing enough desalination capacity to provide water for 250,000 families a year. The new optimism for large-scale ocean desalination projects is based on the success of a host of small groundwater plants, like this one in Oceanside.
[SOUND OF MACHINERY]
ANDERSON: First, says manager Casey Jaworski, they filter sediment out of the brackish water.
JAWORSKI: Then the water goes to the high pressure pumps, then the water goes to the membrane. There, the feed water is separated. Seventy-five percent of the water will be drinking water, twenty-five percent will be concentrate water, which goes out into the ocean.
ANDERSON: After the salt is removed, the water's pH levels are balanced.
[SOUND OF RUNNING WATER]
ANDERSON: Inside the plant's lab, workers can monitor a series of faucets that are constantly running. The taps represent water at different stages of the desalination process.
JAWORSKI: Raw, no we don’t want any raw. Here is product, okay.
ANDERSON: Jaworski puts a glass under the finished product and takes a drink.
JAWORSKI: We do use sodium hypochloride as disinfection, so you won't get a smell, and most people don't taste it at all.
ANDERSON: But the lessons learned here only go so far when you start talking about filtering hundreds of millions of gallons of ocean water. Even with recent technological advances, it takes a lot of power to filter large volumes of water. That's why Southern California officials are proposing to build their desalination facilities right beside the region's power plants.
[SOUND OF WATER]
ANDERSON: County Water Authority spokesman Bob Yamada stands near the Encina Power Plant north of San Diego. The towering 900 megawatt facility sits on the coast, and Yamada says it's natural: the salt water, and power, are already there.
YAMADA: As you can see over here behind my shoulder, they have a cooling water circulation system that takes water from the ocean. And then it's discharged back to the ocean, and they circulate large volumes of cooling water.
ANDERSON: Poseidon Resources hopes to tap into that system, drawing off water that's already been used to cool the turbines. Half that water would be filtered to produce 50 million gallons of fresh water, and the salty residue would be mixed back in with the rest of the coolant water and piped offshore. Company spokesman Peter MacLaggan says this solves the major environmental hurdle for desalination plants: what to do with the salt.
MACLAGGAN: That 50 million gallons a day of concentrated sea water mixes with the 800 million gallons going out of the power plant. Before we even discharge into the outfall from the power plant, we are well below the natural variability in the salinity.
ANDERSON: Biologists say the discharge shouldn't hurt the coastal environment. But some people are concerned about something else: the heavy draw on California's power. In the Middle East solar energy is fueling some new desalination projects, but here, MacLaggin says that's not practical. He says it would require buying large swaths of expensive coastal land to build solar arrays.
MACLAGGAN: We've looked into other sources of energy to fire the power plant, renewable sources and traditional sources, and typically, what you find is while the renewable sources are becoming more cost-effective, they still haven't gotten to the point where they're able to compete with purchasing the power directly from the power plant itself.
ANDERSON: But the reliance on traditional energy sources makes some people leery. The director for the Center of Energy Studies at San Diego State University, Alan Sweedler, says the push to build power plant-based desalination facilities could leave the region with a difficult choice. If power supplies get pinched, like they did during California's recent energy crisis, public officials may be forced to choose between water and power.
SWEEDLER: We need the power from those plants. And if we begin to rely very heavily on desalination, that means we're going to have to import more power, we're going to have to possibly build another power plant on the coast, or we're going to have to generate power someplace else in the county.
ANDERSON: All of those options could be very costly for an area that already has some of the highest power prices in the country. But with the memory of the California power crisis ebbing, and the supply of Colorado River water shrinking, officials appear ready to spend billions to tap into the ocean's potential as a drinking water source. For Living on Earth, I'm Erik Anderson in San Diego.
Skulls and Bones
CURWOOD: Further up the California coast, San Francisco native Ran Bandar can be found at the beach. Summer, fall, winter and spring, he combs the shore in an unusual quest. Ray’s hobby is retrieving skulls and bones from the dead marine mammals that wash ashore. Reporter Rose Hoban recently followed Ray out to the beach and she prepared this report.
[BEACH SOUNDS]
HOBAN: When most people see a dead animal on the beach, they give it a wide berth. Not Ray Bandar. When he comes across the decaying carcass of an elephant seal, he heads straight for it and sets down his knapsack full of tools.
BANDAR: I bring a bunch of knives and a sharpener and a little fork to scoop out brain tissue.
HOBAN: Ray snaps on a pair of latex gloves and sizes up the situation.
BANDAR: Oh, this guy’s been dead for weeks, and probably floating most of that time.
Ray Bandar and an adult female Stellar Sea Lion, Ano Nuevo Island, California, 1963.
HOBAN: Then Ray gets to work cutting away at rotting flesh to reach the bones underneath. It takes time. The seal was a full-grown male, about 12 feet long, and easily weighed several thousand pounds. He has only one thing in mind: getting that skull.
The smell makes me choke, but Ray doesn’t even notice anymore. That’s because he’s been cutting skulls off of dead animals since the Eisenhower administration.
BANDAR: Well, I’ve collected, well, more than 6,000 animals easy. I’ve cut up and collected the skulls from more California sea lions than any other person alive.
HOBAN: It’s hard to believe this all started with one skull back in 1953. Ray was in art school and was studying Georgia O’Keefe and German photographer Andres Feineger, both of whom had given him an appreciation of bones as sculpture.
BANDAR: Bones are beautiful. They’re fantastic pieces of sculpture. And so once they’re cleaned up, God…they’re art pieces. But they also can tell you a functional story about the life of the animal.
HOBAN: Ray eventually became a high school biology teacher and he continued to collect bones during his spare time. Now, after 40 years of beachcombing, his tall frame and tattered blue field jacket are familiar to wildlife authorities all along the California coast. Perhaps what’s startling is that most of his vast collection is stored at his San Francisco home.
BANDAR: The house is actually an art museum and natural history museum. And a bone palace.
HOBAN: Where do you live in your house?
BANDAR: Oh, I have plenty of place to live. There are bones on all three levels, and the third level has thousands of skulls on display.
HOBAN: Ray shows off the sculptural qualities of bones throughout the house, from abstract pelican pelvises over the fireplace to snake skeletons curled up in glass cases. In Ray’s house, bones are art and bones are humor. There’s a set of moose antlers in the bathtub and a ceramic cup full of penis bones on the dining room table.
But Ray doesn’t collect just for himself. In fact, that would be illegal. He has permission from the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco to collect, and his findings are donated, at least in spirit. Because Ray’s home is actually an official annex of the academy.
LONG: One of the reasons why Ray has such a huge number of specimens at his house is because we don’t have the room here to store them.
HOBAN: Douglas Long is the head of ornithology and mammalogy at the Academy of Sciences. Last year when the academy made plans to renovate, Long knew they needed to accommodate Ray’s bones. So he sent architects to Ray’s house to take measurements.
LONG: I didn’t tell these people what they were going to run into, and I knew that they would be completely blown away by what they saw. And it was about 10, maybe 15 minutes before their jaws become un-slackened.
HOBAN: Long says a collection like Ray’s is invaluable to science. In just the past year researchers have taken tiny drillings from teeth in Ray’s sea lion skulls to study environmental toxins. Other scientists compared chemicals in the sea lion teeth from before and after an El Nino to examine changes in the animals’ diets.
LONG: People have come up with some fantastic ways of looking for scientific information from these specimens, so there are techniques that will come up in the future that we have no idea now. Who knew about DNA a hundred years ago? Who knew about isotopic chemical analysis from teeth ten years ago?
HOBAN: Over the years Douglas Long has learned to defend Ray’s hobby and what some people see as his weird, relentless search for dead animals.
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| Ray Bandar holds a 7 1/2 foot Red Kangaroo that was found dead on a road in Queensland, Australia, 1981. (Photo: Alkmene Bandar) | Ray Bandar cleans one of three male California Sea Lion skulls, Ano Nuevo Island, California, circa 1970’s.
LONG: I think he’s weird because he doesn’t have a TV, doesn’t have a computer, doesn’t drink alcohol, doesn’t gamble, doesn’t even eat junk food unless it’s free, and I think that is probably the weirdest thing about him. I think there’s absolutely nothing weird about having the drive to understand nature and to collect scientific information for our institution. That’s normal.
HOBAN: For Ray, collecting has been almost an act of faith. He has no way of knowing what use scientists will find for these bones, these studies in shape and light. They have been his life’s work and they’re his gift to the future. Now Ray’s legacy is on display at the California Academy of Sciences. And soon there will be a permanent space dedicated to his collection. But he has no intention of resting. BANDAR: In a month and a half I’ll be 75. HOBAN: So, isn’t it time to quit? BANDAR: Hell no. As long as my legs still hold up and there’s still stuff on the beaches, I’m going to work the beaches. As long as there’s still stuff to get from the zoos, I’ll be collecting stuff. HOBAN: At this rate, the academy had better plan a big extension. For Living on Earth, I’m Rose Hoban in San Francisco. [MUSIC: Richard Warner “Spirit Wind” Quiet Heart/Spirit Wind Enso Records (1996)] CURWOOD: This month you can hear author Sy Montgomery read from her new book “Search for the Golden Moon Bear” on the Living on Earth website. MONTGOMERY: In glossy monsoon soils they leave their footprints. With five rounded toes and a long heel pad on the back foot, their footsteps look like those of giant humans. But you could spend years exploring these tangled rainforests and never see a moon bear. Instead, you would find them, as we did, caged in back of tourist hotels, chained outside of city pharmacies, and at markets like this one. CURWOOD: It’s the search for the golden moon bear, all this month on our website, livingonearth.org. That’s livingonearth.org. [MUSIC] And you’re listening to NPR’s Living on Earth. FEMALE ANNOUNCER: Funding for Living on Earth comes from the World Media Foundation Environmental Information Fund. Major contributors include the Town Creek Foundation and the Wellborn Ecology Fund. Support also comes from NPR member stations and Bob Williams and Meg Caldwell, honoring NPR’s coverage of environmental and natural resource issues and in support of the NPR President’s Council; and Paul and Marcia Ginsberg, in support of excellence in public radio.
Pigeons in the ParkCURWOOD: Many New Yorkers are resigned to the fact that parks and pigeons are an eternal partnership. But Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan is trying out a novel plan to get rid of the winged loiterers and their droppings. Park administrators have called in a team of hawks to scare off the pigeons. Tom Cullen is the raptor specialist who is running the program. Tom, how do you and the hawks on your crew go about getting rid of the pigeons in the park?
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Harris’ Hawk (Photo: Southwest Wildlife) 
