[Durham INC] Guest Column: Neighborhood listservs are the owl's meow! (Durham News)

[bragin at nc.rr.com]

The non-emergency number is 560-4600.

Barry Ragin
---- John Schelp <bwatu at yahoo.com> wrote: 

=============
Guest Column: Neighborhood listservs are the owl's meow! 
By Betty Hodges, Durham News, 07 Oct 2009

Durham's vigorous neighborhoods keep current with their listservs. They provide a way to keep up with everything from garbage pickup schedules and reports of break-ins to appeals for advice on babysitters, plumbers, electricians and the like.

It's not surprising that most listservs can be entertaining, inevitably taking on the flavor of the neighborhood of their origin.

The Duke Park Neighborhood Association listserv has been very animal-conscious from its inception. A lost cat can engender innumerable postings, from first report of a sighting to the eventual joyous return of the beloved feline. And users learn quickly that you don't call 911, or even 560-6500, the non-emergency number, for help in rescuing a cat from a tree.

"We don't do cats," Sgt. Gunter, the popular and witty Division 2B lawman, tells a petitioner from the get-go.

In no time at all an interested onliner neighbor chimes in, "Try Animal Rescue."

Another online neighbor sounds off, "I think that [to get a cat out of a tree] you call your cat and tell it to come down. If the cat got up the cat can get down."

Once I became entranced with the cacophony of an owl courtship in the woods up the street. A series of familiar calls was followed immediately by what sounded like a raucous cat fight. It got to be a recognizable sequence: owl calls followed by cat fight. It became a regular evening serenade. Finally I appealed to the listserv for illumination and got the instant answer: the melody I'd been hearing was the mating call and the apparent catfght was the sound of the actual coupling once the call-and-response chorus was successful. OK, so owls are distinctly vocal lovers.

But the clincher came the other night when I came upon an informative posting from a turtle expert in answer to a query from a turtle espert in answer to a query about the requirements for keeping a turtle as schoolroom pet.

"Turtles make terrible, terrible, terrible pets," no matter whether their owners are forgetful children or well-meaning but uninformed adults, wrote turtle rescuer Kim Willis.

To start with, she said, turtles, as do all reptiles, carry salmonella so it's not all that smart for people to handle them. Additionally, in captivity turtles develop a variety f illness and require great care.

Given access to the outdoors they will obey a powerful homing instinct and strike out for home, only to be killed by a car or other vehicle in the nearest street, she elaborated.

Willis reports further that the once-great North Carolina turtle population is in such danger that only four native species, the common snapper, eastern and striped mud turtles and the common musk turtle are not on the protected list. Besides destruction of habitat and thle onging threat of road vehicles, illegal pet trade has diminished the state's turtle population in the harvest of common snapper turtles, among others, to feed the Asian appetite for their flesh.

Bored? Just open your listserv and smoke over the postings.


_______________________________________________
Durham INC Mailing List
list at durham-inc.org
http://www.durham-inc.org/list.html