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My landlord, the rabbit and the rattler By Ron Baird
Aug 1st
My landlord, Jack, comes by from time to time and more often than not we sit and talk. He’s in his early 80s and looks like the farm kid he once was, with thick arms, big hands and a chest that hasn’t fallen much to the ravages of time.
His shock of gray hair has usually been wet-combed across his head, kind of like Opie of Mayberry at 75 if he hadn’t gone bald. He favors flannel shirts, jeans and workboots and often has a pipe clamped in his teeth, puffing away without inhaling.
He talks about climbing Colorado’s mountains back in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, when trips were made in old jalopies, the roads were narrow and winding and gear was primitive and heavy. He was at the University of Colorado then and he and a bunch of his climbing buddies scaled most of the 14ers in the state.
He graduated with a degree in some kind of engineering and has gone on to a full life of work and family here in Boulder. His wife is healthy, his kids are healthy and happy and have families of their own.
He’s building a steel-hulled boat in his back yard, has been for years, and fully expects to launch it into the ocean at some point in the future.
Jack is also a native of Boulder, grew up on a farm/ranch a ways north of town. He calls it a farm but I know that ground and there isn’t much that can be grown on it except cactus and wild grass and as it turns out subdivisions and mountain mansions. He was relating how lonely it was living out there as a kid.
I don’t know how we got around to it, but we were discussing rattlers, which were common back then. And he told me a story.
“One day when I was about 10, we heard the damnedest ruckus coming from the field behind the house and we went out to see what the hell was going on. When we got out there, there was a mother rabbit standing between a rattler and her babies, which were in a nest in the grass. I guess the rattler wanted to make a meal out of them babies and the mother was having none of it. When the snake started forward, she’d move towards it. The snake would coil and she would lunge, drawing a strike. At the last second, she would spin away and kick the snake in the head with both hind feet, knocking it away. The snake would gather itself and start forward and she’d do the same thing again. It was the damnedest thing I ever saw.
“Now, you have to understand that we weren’t very sentimental about such things back in those days. So we just watched. And besides, we’d never seen anything like that. Who could have imagined a momma rabbit would, or could, do something like that to protect her babies? But this went on for, I would guess, 20 minutes. Every time that snake started forward, she would kick it again. You could tell they were both getting pretty tired but the snake wasn’t giving up and neither was she. But the snake was bleeding from the eyes and mouth, and the bleeding was getting worse and worse. And it seemed to be disoriented and would lay there longer and longer before trying again. The rabbit would lay down, and its sides were fluttering she was breathing so hard. But when the snake got up so would the rabbit.
“Finally, the snake didn’t move anymore. I don’t think it was dead exactly, but it was dying. It’s head looked like somebody had hit it with a baseball bat. I wasn’t sure the mother rabbit was going to make it, either, but I’ll be damned if she didn’t finally she get up and hop to the nest where she had her babies.
“As I said, we weren’t too sentimental back then. We knew nature was hard. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how brave that momma rabbit was, so I went back to the barn and got a shovel and went out and cut that rattler’s head off, just to be safe. I think she earned that⎯not having to worry about that snake any more.”
Jack, even 65 years later, still shakes his head in admiration, as he finishes the story. “I’ve never stopped thinking about it.”
And now that I’ve heard the story, I can’t get the death duel of the momma rabbit and the rattler out of my head, either.
His shock of gray hair has usually been wet-combed across his head, kind of like Opie of Mayberry at 75 if he hadn’t gone bald. He favors flannel shirts, jeans and workboots and often has a pipe clamped in his teeth, puffing away without inhaling.
He talks about climbing Colorado’s mountains back in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, when trips were made in old jalopies, the roads were narrow and winding and gear was primitive and heavy. He was at the University of Colorado then and he and a bunch of his climbing buddies scaled most of the 14ers in the state.
He graduated with a degree in some kind of engineering and has gone on to a full life of work and family here in Boulder. His wife is healthy, his kids are healthy and happy and have families of their own.
He’s building a steel-hulled boat in his back yard, has been for years, and fully expects to launch it into the ocean at some point in the future.
Jack is also a native of Boulder, grew up on a farm/ranch a ways north of town. He calls it a farm but I know that ground and there isn’t much that can be grown on it except cactus and wild grass and as it turns out subdivisions and mountain mansions. He was relating how lonely it was living out there as a kid.
I don’t know how we got around to it, but we were discussing rattlers, which were common back then. And he told me a story.
“One day when I was about 10, we heard the damnedest ruckus coming from the field behind the house and we went out to see what the hell was going on. When we got out there, there was a mother rabbit standing between a rattler and her babies, which were in a nest in the grass. I guess the rattler wanted to make a meal out of them babies and the mother was having none of it. When the snake started forward, she’d move towards it. The snake would coil and she would lunge, drawing a strike. At the last second, she would spin away and kick the snake in the head with both hind feet, knocking it away. The snake would gather itself and start forward and she’d do the same thing again. It was the damnedest thing I ever saw.
“Now, you have to understand that we weren’t very sentimental about such things back in those days. So we just watched. And besides, we’d never seen anything like that. Who could have imagined a momma rabbit would, or could, do something like that to protect her babies? But this went on for, I would guess, 20 minutes. Every time that snake started forward, she would kick it again. You could tell they were both getting pretty tired but the snake wasn’t giving up and neither was she. But the snake was bleeding from the eyes and mouth, and the bleeding was getting worse and worse. And it seemed to be disoriented and would lay there longer and longer before trying again. The rabbit would lay down, and its sides were fluttering she was breathing so hard. But when the snake got up so would the rabbit.
“Finally, the snake didn’t move anymore. I don’t think it was dead exactly, but it was dying. It’s head looked like somebody had hit it with a baseball bat. I wasn’t sure the mother rabbit was going to make it, either, but I’ll be damned if she didn’t finally she get up and hop to the nest where she had her babies.
“As I said, we weren’t too sentimental back then. We knew nature was hard. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how brave that momma rabbit was, so I went back to the barn and got a shovel and went out and cut that rattler’s head off, just to be safe. I think she earned that⎯not having to worry about that snake any more.”
Jack, even 65 years later, still shakes his head in admiration, as he finishes the story. “I’ve never stopped thinking about it.”
And now that I’ve heard the story, I can’t get the death duel of the momma rabbit and the rattler out of my head, either.
Survey shows Boulder voters support creation of a city-owned electric utility by a wide margin
Aug 1st
Seventy-one percent of City of Boulder voters indicated that they either strongly support or support municipalization, according to the results of a statistically valid telephone survey conducted last month. The results were made public by the city today in advance of an important council meeting tomorrow night.
Other key findings include:
Seventy-one percent of those surveyed said the city would be better at offering renewable sources of energy and reducing carbon emissions than Xcel Energy.
A smaller, but majority, percentage (57 percent) thought the city could do a better job at finding innovative solutions to energy problems than Xcel Energy.
Xcel Energy, on the other hand, scored higher (67 percent) in providing reliable energy and (52 percent) in keeping monthly energy bills stable.
Reliability, service, control, energy sources and cost all received high marks as community priorities. Three of these were weighted against each other – low cost, increased renewable sources and having a say in utility decisions. Increasing renewable sources of energy were considered the prevailing priority among these by a majority of residents.
Sixty-five percent of those surveyed indicated they support the issuance of bonds to purchase Xcel’s system. Seventy-seven percent said they would either strongly support or somewhat support the extension/expansion of either the Climate Action Plan or Utility Occupation Tax to cover interim legal and engineering expenses necessary to determine final acquisition and start-up costs.
Ninety-one percent of those surveyed said they would support an increase of between 5 percent to “as much as it takes” in their monthly electric bills to reduce carbon emissions and/or increase renewable sources of energy.
Voters were even more likely to support the creation of a city-owned electric utility if there was a possibility of spending limits, a re-evaluation of final costs before a decision is made about whether to issue bonds and rates within 10 percent of those offered by Xcel Energy. Education about the existence of the 29 other locally-owned utilities in Colorado also made a positive difference.
“The decision our community makes regarding our energy future will be a historic one. These results show that the City of Boulder has listened carefully to our community as we have set our objectives and studied our energy supply options,” City Manager Jane S. Brautigam said. “While we are on the track that many voters support, we also know that taking a measured and prudent approach to this analysis is crucial. We pledge to continue working responsibly and objectively to understand the potential impacts and benefits to all segments of our community.”
The survey, conducted by National Research Center Inc. in Boulder, reached 1,265 registered voters and resulted in 400 completed responses. The response rate of 32 percent was one of the biggest the survey firm has seen in recent years. The results have a margin of error of +/-4.5 percent. The survey occurred between July 6 and July 18.
Tomorrow night’s council meeting will begin at 5 p.m. tomorrow, Tuesday, Aug. 2, in Council Chambers, 1777 Broadway. Elected officials are expected to hear a brief presentation about the survey findings and ask questions before discussing and then voting on ballot language related to how Boulder gets it energy in the future. There will be an opportunity for public input. The decisions council makes at this meeting are expected to form the basis for a third – and final – reading of ballot language on Tuesday, Aug. 16. The election is Tuesday, Nov. 1.
The complete survey report is available at http://www.boulderenergyfuture.com.
CU-BOULDER FACULTY, STUDENTS PART OF NASA’S JUNO MISSION TO JUPITER
Aug 1st
Several University of Colorado Boulder faculty and students are participating in NASA’s Juno Mission to Jupiter, now slated for launch Aug. 5 from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center and which is expected to help steer scientists toward the right recipe for planet-making.
The primary goal of the mission is to understand the origin and evolution of the massive gas planet, said CU-Boulder Professor Fran Bagenal of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, a mission co-investigator. The data should reveal not only the conditions of the early solar system, but also help scientists to better understand the hundreds of planetary systems recently discovered around other stars, she said.
After the sun formed, Jupiter got the majority of the “leftovers,” said Juno Mission principal investigator Scott Bolton from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Since Jupiter has a larger mass than all of the other planets in the solar system combined, scientists believe it holds the keys to understanding how the planets formed and why some are rocky and others are gas giants, Bagenal said.
Once Juno reaches Jupiter orbit in 2016 after a 400-million-mile trip, the spacecraft will orbit the planet’s poles 33 times, skimming roughly 3,000 miles above the cloud tops in a region below Jupiter’s powerful radiation belts. While the spacecraft itself is about the size of a Volkswagen and encased in a protective radiation vault, its three solar panels that will unfurl in space will make the spinning spacecraft more than 65 feet in diameter.
Bagenal said scientists were continually surprised by the data beamed back from NASA’s Galileo mission to Jupiter, which arrived at the planet in 1995 and carried 16 instruments, including two developed by CU-Boulder’s LASP. Among other discoveries, Galileo scientists identified the global structure and dynamics of the planet’s magnetic activity, confirmed the presence of ammonia clouds in its atmosphere and discovered that one of its moons, Europa, has a global ocean beneath a thick crust of ice.
“One of the biggest questions left after the Galileo mission was how much water there is in Jupiter’s atmosphere,” said Bagenal. “The amount of water is key, because water played a huge role in the formation of the solar system.” Bagenal also is a professor in the astrophysical and planetary sciences department.
“Most of us know that water absorbs microwaves, because that is what happens when you put a cup of tea in your microwave oven,” said Bagenal. “We are going to be using a microwave detector and fly just over the clouds of Jupiter, looking down at different cloud depths to measure the amounts of water below. It’s a bit like doing a CT scan of Jupiter’s dense clouds.”
Bagenal’s role in the mission is to coordinate observations of Jupiter’s magnetosphere –the area of space around the planet that is controlled by its magnetic field. She and her collaborators are especially interested in understanding the processes that control auroral activity at the planet’s poles — its northern and southern lights — and assess the roles of the planet’s strong magnetic field on its surroundings.
In addition to collaborating closely with the Juno science team, Bagenal is working with CU-Boulder Professor Robert Ergun of LASP, who has extensively studied Earth’s magnetosphere and associated polar auroras. Ergun will use his expertise in auroral physics as part of the mission to compare the physical processes at Jupiter with those seen on Earth.
“This will be the first time anyone has flown over the poles of Jupiter to look directly down on the aurora,” said Bagenal. “We will be flying the spacecraft through regions where charged particles are accelerated to the point of bombarding the atmosphere of Jupiter hard enough to make it glow at the poles.”
Bagenal also is working with LASP Research Associate Peter Delomere on the Jovian magnetosphere studies and with physics department graduate student Mariel Desroche, who is modeling the outer region of Jupiter’s magnetosphere as part of the Juno effort.
CU-Boulder senior Dinesh Costlow of the astrophysical and planetary sciences department also is collaborating with Bagenal and the Juno science team by using computer models to simulate the trajectory of the spacecraft through all 33 individual orbits as it passes through Jupiter’s magnetosphere. “We are interested in finding the optimal places in orbit to point the spacecraft for our data collection,” he said.
Costlow, who is from Auburn, Maine, said he knew CU-Boulder had a good astronomy program before he ever set foot on campus. “Everything fell into place, and I feel very lucky to have an opportunity to work on this mission,” Costlow said. “I think graduate school may be my next step, and after that maybe I can make a career out of this kind of planetary research.”
By mapping Jupiter’s gravitational and magnetic fields, mission scientists should be able to see the planet’s interior structure and determine if it has a rocky iron core — a core that some scientists believe could be 15 or 20 times the size of Earth. But because of the immense pressure in the Jovian atmosphere, any spacecraft seeking the core would be crushed long before it neared the middle of the planet, much as the Galileo spacecraft was crushed after it was crashed into the planet’s clouds after the mission concluded in 2003.
“My biggest hope is that all of our predictions about Jupiter are wrong, and that we find something completely different than what we expect,” said Bagenal. “When our preconceived notions are off, it shows us we can never become complacent. New data from the solar system’s planets keeps us excited enough to re-visit them to learn more about the history and fate of our solar system.”
The Juno spacecraft is carrying 11 experiments to probe the planet’s mass, magnetic field, charged particles, auroras, plasma, radio waves, thermal and ultraviolet emissions, and includes a camera to provide images of the colorful Jovian cloud tops. The Juno Mission is being managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company of Denver built the spacecraft, which will be launched aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.
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