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View from the North 40: Nature is wondrous, but not always pretty

Nature is all around us, and sometimes it’s a little too much in-your-face.

A Cooper’s hawk in upstate New York is helping one city with its pigeon problem, but not everyone is appreciative.

A red-eyed, crow-sized raptor, the Cooper’s hawk normally feasts on birds like pigeons and mourning doves, which are often found in urban and suburban areas — so now the hawks are, too.

NYup.com reports that a bank in Dewitt, New York, had a Cooper’s hawk move into the area in the first part of February and since then has been using the bank’s front entrance as its personal killing ground, dining room and carcass disposal area.

Apparently the civilized people of M&T Bank don’t appreciate the front-row seat to these National Geographic moments or the mess left behind. And for some reason they are more afraid of the hawk than all the parasites and diseases they can contract from pigeon droppings.

They put up a fake owl in an attempt to scare away the hawk.

NYup.com interviewed Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology expert Jay McGowan about the situation, and he basically said, Uh, yeah, the fake owl is cute and will give the hawk a higher perch to use while surveying the entrées for lunch, but just hold your horses and the bird will move on.

Bend, Oregon resident Abby Beckley has had nature, literally, in her face and it has landed her in the permanent files for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Washington Post reports that Beckley thought she had an eyelash in her eye, but she pulled out a half-inch long, thready, white worm of unknown origin.

Wisely, Beckley went straight to a medical doctor who pulled out two more worms and sent her to an ophthalmologist who pulled out two more. When no one could answer her questions about the possibility of going blind or having the worms invade her brain, or even what the worms were, she ended up getting an appointment with an infectious disease specialist in Portland, Oregon.

“I’ll never forget the look on the intern’s face when he saw one squiggle across my eye,” she told the Post.

At that point, a sampling from the 14 worms removed was sent on a whirlwind tour of state and CDC labs, eventually ending up in the CDC’s reference laboratory for rare and unusual parasites, called the “final stop for anything difficult.”

There, a researcher remembered something in a 1928 journal written in German — because who among us doesn’t remember details from at least one old German medical journal — that led them to discovering that Beckley had the first known cross-infection of a parasite that normally affects cows and is transferred by flies.

Now, Beckley is an official CDC case-file reminder that we always risk cross contamination whenever there is the intersection of humans, animals and the environment.

On a lighter note, The Associated Press reported that the high school in Burley, Idaho, was on lockdown for about 15 minutes Feb. 13 after a black Angus bull escaped an auction yard, rampaging through town and across the school’s campus. After the bull’s violence spree damaged property and threatened lives, he was given a death sentence.

The shooting did not occur on campus and no lives were lost in the incident but the bull’s.

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As is the custom in beef-eating cultures, the bull’s carcass was ceremonially wrapped in packages and distributed among the people for ritual barbecuing at [email protected].

 

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