|
Issue 002's "So I tried it…" continued.
page 3 The fantasy for me died quickly. Kelly at The Animal Connection here in San Francisco immediately put the kabosh on the turtle idea. "Using free-range turtles for snail abatement purposes," she flatly announced over the phone, "is an ill-conceived idea in San Francisco. The seasons aren't clearly demarcated enough. They don't know when to hibernate." "Oh." "I mean you could do it but you're going to have to build a little house for it, heat it using a…" Her voiced trailed off into the fiber optic ozone. Clearly a turtle was not going to be a part of my native backyard integrated pest management scheme. I was admittedly bummed and thankful that I'd only latched onto that idea for about twenty-four hours. "But there's always toads," I heard her say. Now a cute little frog croaking each evening as the sun was setting sounded like fun. (1) I decided I needed to go talk to Kelly face-to-face. But before I went I wanted to know a little more about the local frog population. I didn't want to go out there and talk to the professionals cold. The cover story of the April-June 2005 issue of Bay Nature just happened to be about our native frogs. Clearly the amphibians were in the zeitgeist. It was meant to be. Turns out in the San Francisco Bay Area we have five native frog and toad species and they're threatened, of course. Isn't everything? In fact the National Biological Information Infrastructure reports that frog populations are in decline in many parts of the world, most alarmingly in some protected areas. Frog deformities are also showing up in statistically unnatural numbers. Could amphibians be the canary in the coal mine? Scientists are attributing these disturbances in the population to a combination of pollutants, invasive species, UV rays and, of course, habitat loss. Well, they can have my backyard!
They can, but Kelly wasn't going to be able to sell me any. Pet stores can't sell native species because as Kelly put it 'then all the wild ones be in the pet stores and thatwouldn't be good'. She had a point. I wasn't about to go poaching so what was I to do now? "You say you've got slugs?" Kelly inquired, brightening."Maybe you can get some Sharp-tailed snakes. They eat nothing but slugs."
|
