Letters to the Editor: Coyotes don't like rich areas? L.A.'s French bulldogs are OK with it
According to a recent L.A. Times story, this is not true of coyotes. Where the well-off domicile, coyotes are less likely to be found. There are legions of miniature poodles, Chihuahuas and French bulldogs that applaud this ethic.
And I would like to say that this has nothing to do with the Oerlikons mounted on the pool cabana balconies.
Andy Siegel, Santa Barbara
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Cosmopolitan
8 hours ago
- Cosmopolitan
These 35 surnames have been identified as having royal connections: See if yours is on the list
Hear ye, hear ye! If you've ever felt that there's just a certain... regal energy to you, or that you'd have made a really good king or queen, or at least a decent noblewoman, it turns out there could be a reason behind that. The DNA-testing and family tree site MyHeritage has identified a list of 35 surnames that have strong royal connections to them, and some are actually pretty common. While it doesn't mean you're next in line for the throne if you have one of the below surnames, it could give an indicator that somewhere in your family tree there's a person (or persons!) of note with connections to the crown. Which is pretty exciting, wouldn't you say? And certainly worth digging into. Here's the list of surnames that could mean you're distantly relate to Prince William, Henry VII or someone else who has rocked a crown in their daily life/has a bunch of land/fancy title. A fairly obvious one, this has been the British royal family's surname since 1917 (prior to that it was the more German-sounding Saxe-Coburg-Gotha). The dynasty that brought us Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, two of the most famous British monarchs. A Scottish family who ruled England and Scotland during the 16th and 17th century. Not a super common surname, but one linked to the royal house that spawned Richard III. A French dynasty who were in charge between 987 and 1,328. The surname of Princess Diana, whose brother, Charles, is the ninth Earl Spencer. More than a biscuit and a type of booze, this European line saw rulers of France, Spain and beyond descend from it. A big-shot family during the Holy Roman Empire, just FYI. British royals like George I and Queen Victoria descended from this line. A branch of the Capet ruling house in France. Remember studying the Wars of the Roses in school? The Lancaster branch, descended from the Plantagenets, went up agains the House of York, also Plantagenet descendants, to bid for the crown during 1455 and 1487. Ultimately, the Tudor victory united the two factions. See above for more details. A great Scottish surname, linked to Robert the Bruce, a king viewed as a Scottish hero for restore the kingdom to an independent state and for winning on the battlefield. Rick will be buzzing! This noble surname has links to English peerage. This surname has connections to medieval nobility and landowners in both Ireland and England. Remember that French royal house we mentioned earlier, Valois? This is a spin-off branch. This powerful Italian family bore not only royalty but popes too. Double win! Not just the name of a posh London hotel, but also a family that once dominated swathes of France and Italy. Erm, can somebody get Gary on the phone? Not only is this surname connected to footballing royalty, but the Nevilles were a powerful English noble family during the medieval period. Another boujee English family who made major waves in British history. Another aristocratic family in England, this lot were Lords of the Manor of Eardisley for 500 years. Another wealthy and well-regarded English family, owning the title of Duke of Norfolk, and who produced one of Henry the VIII's wives, Catherine (number five of six). Jane Seymour was the third wife of Henry VIII, who produced his only male heir, Edward. The names is linked to the Dukedom of Somerset. History buffs will know the twisted tale of Lady Jane Grey, who was Queen for a mere nine days in July 1553, before being booted out by Mary I. This well-regarded English family has produced many an aristocrat, including Earls and Countesses of Essex. Orange-Nassau This is the Dutch royal family's surname – and is why orange-coloured carrots grew in popularity during the 17th century, as farmers tried to grow the brightest ones possible as a tribute to their monarch. Oldenburg This royal house encompasses members of the current Danish royal family. Glucksburg An offshoot of the Oldenburg clan, Glucksburg is also connected with both Danish and Norwegian royalty. Romanov The surname of the last imperial dynasty to rule over Russia. A name that can be traced all the way back to the medieval era, this family has a string of Earls of Arundel in its bloodline. The Russell family bore the Dukes of Bedford. With both English and French royal links, if this is your surname you're in with a double shot of being regal. Congrats! The Dukes of Rutland descend from the Manners family tree. The Cavendish family still holds the title of Duke of Devonshire. The current Duke is Peregrine Cavendish, who is the twelfth to bare the title having inherited it in 2004. This noble family name still holds the the Earldom of Shrewsbury. The current Earl of Shrewsbury is the casually named Charles Henry John Benedict Crofton Chetwynd Chetwynd-Talbot. Jennifer Savin is Cosmopolitan UK's multiple award-winning Features Editor, who was crowned Digital Journalist of the Year for her work tackling the issues most important to young women. She regularly covers breaking news, cultural trends, health, the royals and more, using her esteemed connections to access the best experts along the way. She's grilled everyone from high-profile politicians to A-list celebrities, and has sensitively interviewed hundreds of people about their real life stories. In addition to this, Jennifer is widely known for her own undercover investigations and campaign work, which includes successfully petitioning the government for change around topics like abortion rights and image-based sexual abuse. Jennifer is also a published author, documentary consultant (helping to create BBC's Deepfake Porn: Could You Be Next?) and a patron for Y.E.S. (a youth services charity). Alongside Cosmopolitan, Jennifer has written for The Times, Women's Health, ELLE and numerous other publications, appeared on podcasts, and spoken on (and hosted) panels for the Women of the World Festival, the University of Manchester and more. In her spare time, Jennifer is a big fan of lipstick, leopard print and over-ordering at dinner. Follow Jennifer on Instagram, X or LinkedIn.
Time Magazine
a day ago
- Time Magazine
The Letters My Grandmother Received From Auschwitz
Every year at our family Seder, my dad would pull down a small cedar box from the closet shelf. He'd carry it to the table and lift the lid, releasing the scent of spicy red cedar into the room. Inside were letters, postcards stacked and yellowed with history, written in careful French. At the top corner of each letter: a deep red stamp bearing the profile of Adolf Hitler. 'These were written by my grandfather to my mother,' he would say, 'from Auschwitz.' Then he'd issue his annual warning: 'Every few decades, this happens to the Jews. So always be looking out. Have eyes in the back of your head.' I thought it sounded paranoid. I had never known anything close to antisemitism growing up in Northern California. I wasn't exactly sure what the message these letters held, but they spoke to me. Letter from Avram to Danielle, 1944. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Michel Snegg It was when I turned 40, as I was about to become a father myself, that I felt compelled–by ancestors, by spirit, by responsibility, by the muses–to understand the letters, written both to my grandmother and to the friends looking after her, and to find the story that lived inside their words. My grandmother Fernande Halerie was born in Paris in 1923 to Romanian Jewish immigrants. Her parents, Avram and Marguerite, were sharply dressed tailors. Avram was an amateur poet and her older brother David played the banjo. She loved to roller-skate through the boulevards with her friends. They lived in the bustling 24th arrondissement, part of a thriving immigrant community. Marguerite and Avram circa 1920-1940 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Michel Snegg In 1942, when Fernande was 16, her parents were arrested. They were sent through the Drancy transit camp and loaded onto a cattle car to Auschwitz. The first letter in our collection begins, 'Dear Friends, My wife and I are in a cattle car with no air and no light destined for Poland. I hope that everything is going well at your home with regard to Fernande. Do all that's possible to care for her and keep her at Monique's home. Be brave and we will see you soon.' Slipped through a slot in the cattle car, it arrived days later. Fernande wanted to go with them, but because she was French-born, she wasn't on the list to be deported. They told her to stay behind. So she did. And through the strength, ingenuity, and power of love, she survived. The letters began to arrive from a place called Blechhammer, a forced labor camp in southern Poland, a subcamp of Auschwitz. It turns out my great-grandfather Avram had been pulled from the train with 154 other able-bodied men at the Cosel rail junction. While his wife went on to Auschwitz and was almost certainly gassed upon arrival, Avram was sent as labor to build synthetic-fuel plants for the Nazi war machine. Thanks to his sociable personality, he got a job working at the infirmary away from the hard grind of the plant. He built a black-market network inside the camp, bartering supplies, sewing clothing, and maintaining lines of communication with the outside. He relied on Fernande, his teenage daughter, to move around occupied Paris and gather the packages—food, thread, medicine, perfume—that he needed to stay alive. During the week, Fernande lived alone in the family's Paris apartment under a false name: Danielle Deschampe. The ID card lives in our collection still. On weekends, she stayed with the Pliez family, Catholics who risked their lives to protect her. Their daughter Monique was the same age. They would go to Mass together on Sundays. On Rosh Hashanah of 1944, Fernande met a young American Jewish soldier named David Snegg at the Grand Synagogue in Paris. He didn't speak French and she didn't speak English, but they fell in love. Their romance played out over 120 letters—adorned with lipstick kisses and hand-drawn hearts. 'I kiss your picture so much I'm afraid I'll wear it out,' he wrote. Over 120 letters were sent between Danielle and David. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Michel Snegg Meanwhile, Avram's letters slowed and then stopped. Fernande waited anxiously. She knew Blechhammer had been liberated. She watched other neighbors return. Still, no word. It turns out Avram had survived not only Blechhammer but a two-week death march through the German winter. He passed through Gross-Rosen, then Buchenwald, and finally arrived at Ohrdruf, a subcamp where they were building a grand underground bunker system to hide the Fuhrer. There, Avram's number was recorded on an infirmary card, just days before American troops liberated the camp. Ohrdruf was the first Nazi camp encountered by General Eisenhower. When he saw it, he summoned the press. 'I made the visit deliberately,' he wrote, 'in order to be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda.' Avram didn't make it. As the Americans approached, SS guards lined up the prisoners and opened fire. Some survived by falling to the ground. But he was killed. His best friend survived and found Fernande in the apartment in Paris. With him, he carried her father's last words: 'Tell Fernande I love her with all my heart.' Soon after, Fernande and David, with a toddler in tow, said goodbye to the Pliez family and the Parisian community that had helped her survive. They set sail for a new life in Los Angeles. My father was conceived in a Pullman car somewhere between New York and California. Going by her new name, Danielle, she lived in Pasadena and raised two boys. One day, she accompanied a friend to the studio lot of her favorite radio show, Queen for a Day , a game-show-style program where women shared personal stories before a live audience. Whoever told the 'saddest' story, and got the loudest applause, was crowned Queen for a Day. The Queen was granted a special wish and received prizes like a new washer-dryer. My grandmother was chosen to take the stage. When she told her story, the applause-o-meter hit the red and she was crowned Queen for a Day. Her wish? To find out what happened to her parents and brother. The show could not provide her with all the answers, but it did find her father's brother who now lived in Memphis and they became close. She also won a beautiful new patio set. Danielle (second from left) winning Queen for a Day. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Michel Snegg Over the years my father attended to the collection of letters. He had them carefully translated by an expert and had intended to donate them to the Shoah museum in Paris. But when he showed the collection to a curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on a trip to Washington, D.C., with his grandchildren, she stopped him. 'This is the largest collection of uncensored letters I've ever seen,' she told him. 'You can't walk out of here with these.' The letters are now safely held at the USHMM, beautifully presented online and available for future generations. My grandmother's story joins the millions of others, from the darkness of a closet shelf into the healing light of remembrance. Now I'm continuing the work. As an artist I set out to dive deep into the letters and embark on a journey of understanding. A path filled with questions. What were the causes and conditions that these letters needed to be written in the first place? How was it that they were able to send and receive packages in a black-market operation? What happened to Avram? What was it like for a 16-year-old girl to be alone in Paris? As I look for the throughlines, the patterns, the arc, the symbols, and the story, what strikes me most is the power and intimacy of a letter, words on a page that cut through time and space, voices perfectly preserved. The horror of the Holocaust is undeniable, but the letters share a message not of paranoia or fear but of hope and courage. They serve as a reminder that life and love triumph over darkness and evil, that a seed, carried far on the winds and currents of history, can find conditions to flourish. Avram didn't survive. But through the deep love between a father and daughter, our family did. Because of that love, I'm here to write these words, to live a life in freedom, and to raise a beautiful son and a daughter of my own.
Vox
a day ago
- Vox
Giant invasive frogs are wreaking havoc on the West
is an environmental correspondent at Vox, covering biodiversity loss and climate change. Before joining Vox, he was a senior energy reporter at Business Insider. Benji previously worked as a wildlife researcher. On summer evenings in the Midwest, the muggy air comes alive with a chorus of crickets, cicadas, and frogs — especially bullfrogs. Their booming mating calls sound like something between a foghorn and a didgeridoo. As far as we know, summer here has always sounded like this. Bullfrogs are native to most of the Eastern US, from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Coast. They evolved here. They belong here. I, for one, adored them as a kid growing up in Iowa, and spent countless summer days trying to catch them to get a closer look. What's unusual is that a few states west — into Colorado and on to California — summer nights are similarly marked by the iconic call of the American bullfrog. But here, they don't belong. They're unwanted. And they threaten the very existence of some of the West's other amphibious animals, such as the Oregon spotted frog, which is found only in the Pacific Northwest. An American bullfrog tadpole next to a juvenile northwestern pond turtle. Courtesy of Sidney Woodruff American bullfrogs are not native to the Western US. Humans brought them to the region more than a century ago, largely as a food source. And in the years since, the frogs — which are forest green and the size of a small house cat — have multiplied dramatically, spreading to countless ponds and gobbling up everything that fits in their mouths, including federally threatened and endangered species. Conservation scientists now consider them among the most dangerous invasive species in the Western US, and in the 40-plus other countries worldwide where they've been introduced. That leaves bullfrogs in an unusual position. Invasive species are typically brought in from other countries — Burmese pythons in Florida and spotted lanternflies in New York City come from Asia, for example — but American bullfrogs are, as their name suggests, American. They're both native and invasive in the same country. And the difference of just a few states determines whether we treat them like pests or as an important part of the ecosystem. It's easy to hate bullfrogs. They do cause a lot of damage and, like other non-native species, they're leading to what some researchers call the Starbucksification of the natural world — you find the same thing everywhere you go, which can make ecosystems less resilient. Yet bullfrogs themselves aren't the main problem, but rather a symptom of a much bigger one. How bullfrogs took over the West One reason is that people enjoy eating them. Or more specifically, their legs. In the 1800s, as the human population in the West surged amid the Gold Rush, so did an appetite for frog legs, which were associated with fancy French cuisine. To meet that demand, people collected native amphibians from the wild, like the California red-legged frog. But as those species became rarer and rarer — in part, due to overharvesting, researchers suspect — entrepreneurs and farmers started importing American bullfrogs from the eastern US and tried to farm them. For a time, it seemed like the bullfrog industry might take off. 'Bullfrog legs! Something to tickle the gustatory glands of the epicurean bon vivants,' a reporter wrote in the Riverside Daily Press, a California paper, in 1922. 'Propagation of the bullfrog in this state already has become a successful reality. In the near future, bullfrog farming may be expected to take its rightful place as one of the prominent industries of California.' That never really came to pass. Bullfrog farming proved challenging and financially risky: They take years to raise, they need loads of live food, and they're prone to disease outbreaks, as Sarah Laskow wrote in Atlas Obscura. And for all that trouble, they don't produce much meat. A bullfrog in the water at a golf course in Fort Worth, while the frog leg industry didn't spread, the frogs, of course, did. They escaped from farms and, with other accidental and intentional introductions, proliferated until they were common in ponds, lakes, and other water bodies throughout much of the West, including Arizona, California, and the Pacific Northwest. Now, in some portions of the region, 'you see so many bullfrogs that it's just sort of alarming,' said Michael Adams, an amphibian researcher at the US Geological Service, a government research agency that monitors wildlife. There are no reliable estimates of the total population of bullfrogs in the West, though a single pond can be home to thousands of individuals. Part of what enabled their success is biology: A female bullfrog can lay as many as 25,000 eggs at one time, far more than most native species. But as several researchers told me, humans have also modified the landscape in the West in ways that have helped bullfrogs take over. While western states have rivers and wetlands, permanent warm waterbodies weren't common until the spread of agriculture and the need for irrigation, said Tiffany Garcia, a researcher and invasive species expert at Oregon State University. Now ponds, reservoirs, and canals — which bullfrogs love — are everywhere. 'It's a story of human colonization,' Garcia said. 'Bullfrogs were brought by people settling and industrializing the West, and they are maintained by people who are natural-resource users of the West. They wouldn't be here and survive without us changing the landscape to create these systems where they do so well.' Bullfrogs are often found alongside other non-native species, Garcia said, which typically tolerate landscapes modified by humans. And sometimes they even help each other succeed. Research has, for example, shown that bluegill sunfish — introduced in the West largely for sportfishing — can help bullfrogs survive. Sunfish will eat dragonfly larvae that might otherwise prey on bullfrog tadpoles. 'You can't even consider them invasive species anymore,' Garcia said of bullfrogs. 'You have to consider it an invasive community.' Bullfrogs are bullies Like unsupervised toddlers, bullfrogs will put pretty much anything in their mouths. Mice, birds, turtles, snakes, rocks, other bullfrogs — if it fits, they'll try to eat it. This is a big problem for species that are already rare, such as the Chiricahua leopard frog or the northwestern pond turtle. Bullfrogs are shrinking their paths to extinction. 'They're implicated in the declines, along with habitat loss and drought, of many of our native reptile and amphibian species,' said Sidney Woodruff, a doctoral researcher at the University of California Davis who studies bullfrogs and other invasive amphibians. In May, Woodruff published a study that found that waterbodies in Yosemite National Park that were full of bullfrogs had lower densities of northwestern pond turtles than those without invasive frogs. She also found that where bullfrogs were present, only large turtles could survive. A northwestern pond turtle in Yosemite National Park. Courtesy of Sidney Woodruff 'Our study adds mounting evidence that hatchling and juvenile pond turtle losses to bullfrogs pose a serious threat to pond turtle population persistence,' Woodruff and her co-authors wrote. And where bullfrogs live in communities with other invasive species, native animals often face even greater challenges, said JJ Apodaca, executive director of the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental group. Non-native crayfish, for example, are voracious consumers of plants and other habitat features that native animals hide in. So, where you have invasive crayfish, the local fauna will be that much easier for bullfrogs to eat. Invasive bullfrogs may also be spreading diseases. A study published in 2018 linked the arrival of bullfrogs in the West with the spread of a pathogen called chytrid fungus. While the pathogen typically doesn't sicken bullfrogs, it has helped drive the decline and extinction of more than 200 amphibian species globally, including those in the West. Okay, so let's kill all the bullfrogs? No, a bullfrog-killing spree won't fix ecosystems in the West. They're already everywhere, so even if scientists manage to eliminate them from a pond or 10 ponds — which often requires fully drying out the water body and hours and hours of effort — they'll likely come back. 'It's futile,' Garcia said. 'We're not getting rid of bullfrogs. Not really.' Even if we could remove bullfrogs from large areas in the West, ecosystems wouldn't suddenly revert back to some sort of natural state. Bullfrogs are both a problem themselves and a symptom of change — of the large-scale transformation of land in the West. 'There's kind of an irony,' said Brendon Larson, a researcher and invasive species expert at the University of Waterloo. 'We're nurturing these agricultural systems — which are monocultures and non-native species — and then we're turning around and saying we're surprised when a non-native species does well in response to that.' Doing nothing isn't a great option either. Left alone, bullfrogs will continue to replace native species that comprise the ecosystems we depend on, including insects that pollinate our crops and salamanders that can help limit the amount of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere and accelerating climate change. An American bullfrog in Yosemite National Park. Yosemite National Park Service The best approach, researchers told me, is to prioritize bullfrog control — to get rid of frogs in areas with endangered species or where conservation scientists are reintroducing native species that disappeared. This works. For her study on pond turtles earlier this year, Woodruff and her colleagues caught more than 16,000 bullfrogs across two waterbodies in Yosemite — using nets, spears, air rifles, and other methods — which they then euthanized. It was only after her team shrank the invasive frog population that they detected small, baby pond turtles in those areas. That suggests that, absent bullfrogs, the turtles were finally able to breed and survive, 'providing some hope for turtle population recovery once bullfrog predation pressures are alleviated,' the researchers wrote. Woodruff says she noticed all kinds of other native animals return after clearing out the invasive bullfrogs, including native frogs, salamanders, and snakes. 'The coolest thing to me was that the soundscape changed,' she told me. 'Over time, you actually started to hear our native chorus frogs again.' Managing bullfrogs is complicated, Woodruff says, and especially for her. She grew up in Alabama and Georgia, where the animals are native. She liked hearing them. But now she lives in California, where she's studying how they harm the environment, and so hearing them makes her tense up.
