As I was driving down the highway to the annual
Walk On The Wild Side at Stone Lakes, I spotted this trash by the side of the road, directly under the $1000 fine for littering sign. Is this some kind of redneck protest, a political statement or what? And you're probably thinking, maybe some dummy just happened to dump here and didn't even notice the sign. To that I say, possibly, but there was really nothing, and I mean nothing around for miles, so I think it was deliberate. I just don't understand people who will go to this length to mess up a perfectly nice nature area just to tweak the nose of some government official (who's probably the poor Caltrans person who has the clean this s*&t up). I mean, what's the logical alternative; to remove the sign so anyone can just throw their trash out of the window anywhere?? That's surely not the city I want to live in.
The walk through the Stonelakes National Wildlife refuge was great, this is the 2nd time I've gone. They have all sorts of interesting vendors, but it's not too commercial, most of the table/tents were organizations devoted to environmental causes and the proceeds of sales are donated toward the cause. There were also wildlife education/demonstrations on bats, local and invasive water species (hyacinth and sport fish), and the local flora and fauna. The guy from
Wild Things, Inc, pictured below does a wildlife demonstration annually, bringing rehabilitated but still "too damaged to release" critters like a turkey vulture, horned owl, beaver and rattlesnake.
This year he has the cutest juvenile red fox. Which we learned they will have to keep forever as it is illegal to release red fox back into the wild in this part of California. While there are some native red fox in California, the ones around here are thought to be fur farm escapees who have "gone native". According to a
1993 Fish and Game study, the non-native fur farm red foxes are a predatory threat to several endangered bird species, but the
newest information published in the Sacramento Bee this year indicates that there is a particular subspecies of red fox that IS native, so who knows? Native or not this guy was one foxy little pup!
