Brown Dog | Canopy Roads of South Georgia

An anonymous tip was the basis for a warrant for a SWAT team to hold small farmers at gunpoint in handcuffs while the cops took their okra and tomatoes and code compliance officers mowed the grass. Is your grass mowed to code? If sometimes not, maybe you’ll agree police militarization has gone too far.

As Monika Diaz put it for WFAA on 12 August 2013, Owner irked after raid on Arlington’s ‘Garden of Eden’.

Shellie Smith, the owner of Arlington’s “Garden of Eden” says police and code enforcement agents “destroyed everything” in a raid on August 2, 2013.

You might be irked, too.

Radley Balko wrote for Huffpo Thursday, Texas Police Hit Organic Farm With Massive SWAT Raid,

Members of the local police raiding party had a search warrant for marijuana plants, which they failed to find at the Garden of Eden farm. But farm owners and residents who live on the property told a Dallas-Ft. Worth NBC station that the real reason for the law enforcement exercise appears to have been code enforcement. The police seized “17 blackberry bushes, 15 okra plants, Continue reading →

We like our beaver pond, but the beavers are a bit too ambitious. Here’s how they operate.

Haemig PD (2012) Ecology of the Beaver. ECOLOGY.INFO 13,

The forest beside the stream also changes after beaver occupation. When beavers cut down trees for food and for building their dams and lodges, they select the species of trees that they prefer, and leave other tree species standing. Consequently, after many years, the forest beside a beaver pond is usually dominated by different tree species than it was before beaver occupation, and in the gaps where the beavers removed trees, bushes and saplings now grow and with them the animal species that live in the early stages of forest regeneration (Barnes and Dibble 1986; Johnston and Naiman 1990; Pastor and Naiman 1992; Donkor et al. 2000). In addition, when the beaver pond is formed by the dam, water floods and covers the roots of trees that formerly stood along the stream bank. These flooded trees die because the standing water prevents their roots from getting air….

In Wyoming, a survey showed that owners of private lands believed that they benefited from beaver engineering because Continue reading →