CALIFORNIA
It may sound
like a weird thing to have to face at work first thing in the
morning, but inside California’s EPA building in
Sacramento, squirming worms share space with employees. The live
animals, housed in 60-some bins, are such a part of cubicle culture
that staffers compete for the prize of “most productive” worms: The
animals eat lunch leftovers and recycle them into compost, which
workers can then take home for their gardens. People soon get over
the “ick factor,” reports The Associated Press; on the 10th floor
of the Los Angeles public works building, for example, a bin full
of worms sits next to a copy machine, under a sign that reads:
“Quiet please. Worms at work.” The worms come from suppliers such
as “As the Worm Turns” and “Live Nude Worms.” Only red worms thrive
in containers; other species tend to try to escape en masse. What
do red worms like to eat? Observant state employees say coffee
grounds and spoiled fruit disappear fast, but worms turn up their
noses at bologna sandwiches. “They don’t have teeth, so
things have to rot,” says Andrew Hurst, who runs the worm program
for California. “Worms need to be able to slurp.”
WYOMING
Some hunters are so gullible,
it should probably be against the law to trick them.
Wyoming Game and Fish officers, determined to teach scofflaw
hunters a lesson, planted a decoy — a handsome,
realistic-looking young bull elk — close to a road between
Pinedale and Dubois. Then they spent the day watching hunter after
hunter rush to break the law. Of 29 drivers who spotted the decoy,
nine shot at it, with three not even bothering to get out of their
vehicles. All nine were ticketed; the season for antlered elk
hadn’t even opened. Though it was a bad day for lazy hunters,
it was a good day for Wyoming: Nineteen citations were handed out,
netting $7,700 in fines.
OREGON
Starlings love to eat blueberries, and flocks of
the birds, which are native to Europe, can ravage a farmer’s
crop in no time. Farmer Verne Gingerich lost 1,000 pounds of
blueberries per acre to the ravenous birds last year — his
biggest loss ever, he told The Oregonian. But
this year was happily different. Gingerich hired specially trained
Saker falcons, native to the Middle East, to chase off the
starlings, scaring them so much they hardly touched a berry. “To be
real honest, I was somewhat leery” at first, Gingerich said, but
now he’s sold on the captive-bred birds, which are trained by
Utah-based Getty Pollard. Pollard, who started his “falcon
protection company” three years ago, had his first big success
protecting Gallo Winery’s vineyards in California.
Here’s how he spooks the starlings: Pollard first releases a
trained falcon at a farm. Then he circles the property on an
all-terrain vehicle until he startles a group of starlings. He
swings a strap with a lure on the end of it, signaling the falcon
to switch “from a slow, leisurely coast to a laser-beam dive,
zooming so fast and low that wings clip blades of grass…”
Voila! The terrified starlings scatter and flee, never realizing
that the falcons are trained only to disrupt their poaching, not to
eat them.
UTAH
When a
soccer craze hit the central Utah town of Manti, there
was no available land for the 160 kids to play on. There is now,
though some might find it a bit eerie, reports the Salt
Lake Tribune. “There was part of the cemetery that
wasn’t platted out yet,” says town treasurer Michelle
Francks. “So we decided to put the field there.” Kids joke that
they play with the ghosts, but soccer balls rarely reach any
gravestones. Best of all, soccer parents don’t have to drive
their kids 25 miles away for practice.
MONTANA
Gov. Brian Schweitzer
delights in vivid language; he also relishes the
occasional insult. Recently, he targeted New Yorkers by way of
blasting game farms and private hunting preserves in Idaho, where
100 or so elk recently escaped their pen. He told the AP that “In
Montana, we said it’s a bad idea to pen up a bunch of elk,
feed them oats and have fat bankers from New York City shoot them
while they’ve got their heads in a grain bucket.” When asked
whether he supported a ban on domestic elk breeding in Idaho,
Schweitzer said, “You can quote the Montana governor as saying,
‘Dang tootin’.’ For people who don’t know,
that means the affirmative.”
ARIZONA
Working in a refrigerated studio while wearing a
hoodie, artist Jim Victor has created an 800-pound
sculpture for the Arizona State Fair that’s entirely made of
butter. His inedible creation, which he calls “Mount Rushmoo,”
features the heads of four cows: A. Brahama Lincoln, Thomas
Heiferson, Teddy Moosevelt and Jersey Washington. Victor, who also
creates fine-art sculptures, says his food art may not last, but
“It’s put my kids through college.”
Betsy
Marston is editor of Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News in Paonia, Colorado. Tips of
Western oddities are always appreciated and often shared in the
column, Heard around the West.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Heard around the West.
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