Police in the Inland Empire say they found 21 Cavalier King Charles spaniels confined inside a U-Haul truck without proper ventilation. 💔
A man who claimed to be the owner has been arrested on animal cruelty charges. The dogs were taken to a local shelter.
Every time you see a bald eagle flying above or an osprey on a nest, you're looking at the result of work Lucille Stickel started in 1946.
She was a wildlife biologist at a federal research lab in Maryland, and in 1946 she published one of the first studies anyone had done on a brand-new miracle chemical called DDT.
At the time, DDT was being sprayed on everything. It killed mosquitoes, it killed crop pests, and the assumption was that it was basically harmless to anything bigger. Stickel spent the next few decades proving that assumption dead wrong.
She and her colleagues followed DDT through the food chain and into the bodies of birds. They showed how it built up, how it broke down into a compound that wrecked the way birds built their eggshells, and how the eagles and ospreys and pelicans at the top were ending up sitting on nests full of crushed eggs.
The shells had gone too thin to survive a parent's own weight. That was the mechanism behind the great raptor collapse of the 20th century.
This was the body of science Rachel Carson drew on for Silent Spring, and it was the evidence the country leaned on when it finally banned DDT in 1972. The eagles came back. So did the ospreys.
Stickel went on to become the first woman to run a major federal research lab. People called her the bald eagle's best friend. Next time one flies over, that's partly who you have to thank.