The aluminum portrait and larger-than-life photographs on the roof and adjacent to the restaurant La Esquina… are … an homage by the New York City painter Allen Hirsch to Benjamin, his capuchin monkey who died at the age of 14, that is as much a reflection of a broken heart as any light on Broadway. To Mr. Hirsch, who had cut holes in the ceiling of his loft so that Benjamin could run from room to room and had allowed Benjamin to play with his daughter when she was a child, the monkey was not a pet, but “a fellow creature I take care of.”
To others, he was a fugitive. A year and a half ago, The Daily News called Benjamin a “cheek-chomping monkey” after he bit a woman at the inn Mr. Hirsch and his wife operated in upstate New York. When the local authorities demanded that Benjamin be euthanized and tested for rabies, he and Mr. Hirsch disappeared…
Benjamin, who was about 20 inches tall and weighed about seven pounds, died of cancer at a Florida animal sanctuary. Mr. Hirsch, who has created a Web site about Benjamin and the art he has made in the last year while mourning him (benjaminthemonkey.com), talked about the relationship.
Why are you putting up these pieces?
I had such an incredible epic love story with this creature. It spanned 14 years, even though it felt like 50 years, because we spent so much time together. He was dying in a box in a South American town where they kill monkeys, and I nursed him back to health. I became his mother, his father, his partner. Benjamin represented this primordial creature that sort of took me back to my elemental self. We were like two sides of the same creature. He was like the id: I brought out the human in him; he brought out the monkey in me. We had this connection which is hard to describe. I knew what he was feeling.
Still awaiting a patent in the U.S., the technique has been used about 1,000 times since 2008, mainly in gas wells in the Canadian provinces of Alberta, British Columbia and New Brunswick and a smaller handful of test wells in states that include Texas, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Oklahoma and New Mexico, said GasFrac Chief Technology Officer Robert Lestz.Like water, propane gel is pumped into deep shale formations a mile or more underground, creating immense pressure that cracks rocks to free trapped natural gas bubbles. Like water, the gel also carries small particles of sand or man-made material—known as proppant—that are forced into cracks to hold them open so the gas can flow out.Unlike water, the gel does a kind of disappearing act underground. It reverts to vapor due to pressure and heat, then returns to the surface—along with the natural gas—for collection, possible reuse and ultimate resale.And also unlike water, propane does not carry back to the surface drilling chemicals, ancient seabed salts and underground radioactivity.“We leave the nasties in the ground, where they belong,” said Lestz.
Mocking the beaver as a “dentally defective rat,” a Conservative senator proposes that it be replaced by the endangered polar bear as Canada’s national emblem.
Incredible photo, but really awful events. A man who collected several dozen exotic animals in Ohio released them all and then killed himself.
There should be stringent laws on keeping exotic animals… even in zoos.
The final solution, everyone admits, will undoubtedly involve human intervention in a problem caused by humans.
duh.
The Farallon Islands are crawling with nonnative house mice, which could be seen in broad daylight darting and scampering in and out of burrows, on crags amid the cliffs and, as if in mocking defiance, around the 124-year-old Victorian house where scientists study the island ecosystem.
The mice are one of the last remaining introduced species left on the islands – and their population has grown to “plague-like” proportions, according to biologists, who are hatching a scheme to kill off the wily rodents, which devour insects and spiders and attract owls, which also chow on seabird chicks….
The mice population has ballooned over the last century. The 60,000 or so mice – about 500 mice per acre – now make up what is believed to be the highest density of rodents on any island in the world.
The teeming hordes devour the island’s insects, the same food that the endemic Farallon arboreal salamander needs to survive. They also attract owls.
“The burrowing owls show up in the fall when the mice population is at its peak, which is now,” said Gerry McChesney, the manager of the Farallon National Wildlife Refuge for the Fish and Wildlife Service. “They find this smorgasbord of mice, but then the mice population crashes in the winter, right when a lot of breeding seabirds arrive on the island.”
The owls, in turn, begin eating the birds, particularly the Ashy storm petrel, a small gray seabird that breeds and nests in the Farallones, which are home to half of the world’s population of the species. These birds, which are listed as a “species of concern” in California, have yet to recover after losing 40 percent of their population in a 20-year period ending in 1992. Only 10,000 to 15,000 are left in the world.
