Rewilding | BCLH

Big City, Little Homestead is a blog about making your home hospitable for nature and enjoying it! Driveway conversions, bird strike prevention, & more.

[Rewilding | BCLH @Rewilding_BCLH]

I can help anyone in the Montreal area with windows. The cats: your job! https://t.co/mICHCixuQY

[Cats and Birds @SafeCatSafeBird]

Wow! Migrating birds are coming through southern Canada in huge numbers making it a really important time to start keeping your cat from roaming unsupervised (if you don't already) and take steps to avoid window collisions. https://t.co/WTuUj2S7JZ

[Rewilding | BCLH @Rewilding_BCLH]

@Cantguardzach2 Agree. Totally unexpected take and approach

[Rewilding | BCLH @Rewilding_BCLH]

@WWE Raw did a really great intro for Joe Hendry tonight

[Rewilding | BCLH @Rewilding_BCLH]

@MLJK87 @CharlotteAlter This woman has a superiority problem

[Rewilding | BCLH @Rewilding_BCLH]

@c12271322 @EliteClubS0B The guy who wrote and starred in Hamilton. And if you don’t know theatre, well, wrestling IS theatre and Paul Heymann is an impresario

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Vulture populations in India collapsed. 500,000 people died as a result.

In the 1990s, Indian farmers started using a cheap painkiller called diclofenac on their cattle. When vultures ate the carcasses, the drug destroyed their kidneys.

Without vultures, cattle carcasses rotted in fields instead of being stripped clean in 45 minutes. Feral dog populations exploded by five million. Rabies cases surged. Pathogens spread through water supplies.

University of Chicago economists compared death rates in districts that used to have vultures to districts that never did. Human mortality rose more than 4% after the collapse. Over 100,000 extra deaths a year. Half a million in five years.

India banned the drug in 2006. The vultures still haven't recovered.

This is what a keystone species is to us. This is why we protect the animals nobody finds cute.

[CM PUNK SZN @aditya_26_06]

Miseria Cantare at Wrestlemania. Holy fucking shittttt this is a MAIN EVENT 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
#Wrestlemania

[Rewilding | BCLH @Rewilding_BCLH]

@NickGiacobbe You need to go yourself, then. I would not recommend starting with Wagner unless you like OTC’s 10-minute entrances. Speaking of which, opera right now!

I get diff ads than you bc I’m watching it on Netflix and tonight there’s not very many, and a few repeats.

[Rewilding | BCLH @Rewilding_BCLH]

@NickGiacobbe Also don’t knock the opera. “Lost you” - oh am I supposed to cater to you, or alter your perspective? The opera is a great analogy.

[Rewilding | BCLH @Rewilding_BCLH]

@NickGiacobbe At WrestleMania? Really? The backstage and other show promos are replete on Raw and Smackdown. The big events require bigger sales opportunities. That’s the way it works. I’m just glad when it’s not too niche or crass.

[Rewilding | BCLH @Rewilding_BCLH]

@NickGiacobbe We don’t live in a perfect world and we all have diff tastes. I dislike gambling and alcohol and their ads, for example. I’m finding the Hulk Hogan show over-promoted. But who knows how the ad buys and scheduling were finalized. Airtime minutes must be filled. Go make some food…

[Rewilding | BCLH @Rewilding_BCLH]

@NickGiacobbe When was the last time you went to a four hour opera? There will be at least one intermission - chances are, three to four acts. It’s needed for the audience as much as the performers. #WrestleMania is a show in six acts. It’s a fuckton of work. Enjoy it.

[Rewilding | BCLH @Rewilding_BCLH]

@NickGiacobbe I kind of feel like everyone forgot two things:
1) pre-streaming era, hour-long tv shows were 42 minutes for 18 minutes of ads - which paid for the content. Divide by 2 for sitcoms.
2) This is a live show on a single stage. It absolutely requires setup and queuing.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page.

It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection.

Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do.

Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades.

The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water.

It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left.

The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero.

When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.

[Rewilding | BCLH @Rewilding_BCLH]

@luireigns Interesting and kinda cool how both she and Oba Femi are shotput champions

[Rewilding | BCLH @Rewilding_BCLH]

@cosmopolitsk @RepMGP But look at all the comments. It’s heartwarming how some idiot politician edgelady is being roundly mocked and schooled.

[Rewilding | BCLH @Rewilding_BCLH]

@JordynneGrace I was about to say “well you set yourself up to fail” and then I looked at the pic and was like “hey that’s Jordynne Grace”

[Rewilding | BCLH @Rewilding_BCLH]

As a Canadian I have to say when I heard Brock Lesnar moved from Minnesota to a small town in Saskatchewan, raise his kids there, became Canadian, I couldn’t help but like him. Thank you Lesnar!

[Rewilding | BCLH @Rewilding_BCLH]

@guardianeco Please disregard that I forgot "i before e except after c," even though it is after a c, it's a ch.

[Rewilding | BCLH @Rewilding_BCLH]

In which I talk about small efforts and decent payoffs, AKA "acheivements," in householder environmentalism.

And yes, I really will be featured in the @guardianeco Down to Earth newsletter tomorrow. Not as an acheiver, just for The Change I Made

https://t.co/ojy1FAxnri

[Rewilding | BCLH @Rewilding_BCLH]

https://t.co/ojy1FAxnri