This very morning, I held my breath, flipped the lid on the increasingly aromatic alley trash cart, and plunged my rebelling hands into a gelatinous mass of picked-over chicken bones and congealed cartilage.
I was not snack-culling the refuse pile for the dog, though she remained at my side, ever hopeful. No, dear reader, this was all for you: The poultry remains, still held loosely together by the grocery store’s roasting string, were schlurped into a Ziploc and arranged in the freezer, part of the checklist for next week’s “Can I Recycle (or Compost) This?” quiz show at the 2nd annual SunFest.
We implore you to help justify our dumpster-diving by joining us at 3 p.m. on Sept. 27 for our quiz show with leading Colorado recycling and composting experts. If you’re brave enough to assess one of our “Can I Recycle This?” objects, there will be some Colorado Sun swag in it for you. Plus you’ll hear definitive answers on 20 different mystery objects, and also learn what happens to them if you toss them in the right bin. Danny Katz from CoPIRG and Rosie Briggs from Eco-Cycle will be our quiz judges and expert sources.
The chicken bones will stay in the bag. Can we recycle the Ziploc? You’ll have to show up to find out.
Get your SunFest tickets here, and we’d love to see you.
Bring your own hard-to-recycle item and stump our experts, if you like, but let’s respect our partner hosts at the University of Denver by keeping the burnt popcorn and moldy chia pudding in airtight containers, thanks very much.
On to the news!
Reporter
TEMP CHECK
ENDANGERED SPECIES
Why did the California condor cross the border?
350
Number of California condors known to exist in the wild, from northern Mexico to the Pacific Northwest
Condor #1061 had already beaten the stiff odds.
Long one of the world’s most endangered species, there are little more than 300 California condors in the wild of North America, and when avian flu hit the U.S. in 2023, only about 116 of the giant vultures in their southwestern release territory.
Avian flu killed dozens of condors almost immediately. A few were tracked down, sick but still alive, and brought into an Arizona rescue center. Eight survived, including 1061, while 21 died. One-fifth of the Four Corners population was wiped out in March 2023 alone, as condor specialist Tim Hauck puts it.
But 1061 did not have another life to spare. A year later, 1061 was briefly a curious condor making a rare trip over the state line into southwestern Colorado’s canyon country, perhaps goaded on by genetic memories of pre-Ice Age good times for condor broods.
And she was promptly shot. A tracker found her body, fully grown at 3 years old, and sparked an ongoing investigation by Colorado and U.S. wildlife authorities for details on the illegal killing.
Endangered species deaths are crushing to people like Hauck even when it’s a typical part of the reintroduction story. Hauck, though, who works for the Peregrine Fund, does not see every condor death as a threat to the overall program, but an opportunity for more public education. Education on things that may not be on the minds of the everyday, city-dwelling public, but which can be fixed. Such as lead bullets.
Lead shotgun shells were banned from waterfowl hunting because ducks would be poisoned by eating stray pellets. There’s no similar push for a ban on lead bullets, but bird defenders do ask hunters to use copper bullets in areas where rare carrion birds might ingest lead. (The condor diet is heaviest on downed deer and elk, eating up to 3 pounds of meat a sitting.)
“They have a bright future, this species, even though they’re facing a lot of diversity,” Hauck said. “Over the last few years, they’ve proven time and time again there’s enough food, there’s enough breeding habitat, there’s plenty of resources out there for them. It’s just that we have to solve those human-caused problems for the species to truly make those advances to get toward sustainability.”
Read more about the state of affairs for southwestern condors, and the herculean breeding efforts after the last 22 wild condors were captured in 1987, later this week at ColoradoSun.com. From feeding chicks with beaked hand puppets to chip-tracking every single bird, it’s an amazing story.
Section by Michael Booth | Reporter
MORE CLIMATE NEWS
HEALTH
Learning to burp: No, it’s not the title of an indie rock album
In a video posted to Reddit this summer, Lucie Rosenthal’s face starts focused and uncertain, looking intently into the camera, before it happens.
She releases a succinct, croak-like belch.
Then, it’s wide-eyed surprise, followed by rollicking laughter. “I got it!” the Denver resident says after what was her second burp ever.
“It’s really rocking my mind that I am fully introducing a new bodily function at 26 years old,” Rosenthal later told KFF Health News while working remotely, because, as great as the burping was, it was now happening uncontrollably. “Sorry, excuse me. Oh, my god. That was a burp. Did you hear it?”
Rosenthal is among more than a thousand people who have received a procedure to help them burp since 2019, when an Illinois doctor first reported the steps of the intervention in a medical journal.
The inability to belch can cause bloating, pain, gurgling in the neck and chest, and excessive flatulence as built-up air seeks an alternate exit route. One Reddit user described the gurgling sound as an “alien trying to escape me,” and pain like a heart attack that goes away with a fart.
The procedure has spread, primarily thanks to increasingly loud rumblings in the bowels of Reddit. Membership in a subreddit for people with or interested in the condition has ballooned to about 31,000 people, to become one of the platform’s larger groups.
Since 2019, the condition has had an official name: retrograde cricopharyngeus dysfunction, also known as “abelchia” or “no-burp syndrome.” The syndrome is caused by a quirk in the muscle that acts as the gatekeeper to the esophagus, the roughly 10-inch-long muscular tube that moves food between the throat and the stomach.
Join us later in the week at ColoradoSun.com for the rest of a fascinating KFF Health News feature by Rae Ellen Bichell, including how they start to fix the problem — Botox is a key — and how physicians learn about it.
MORE HEALTH NEWS
CHART OF THE WEEK
With boosts from Inflation Reduction Act renewable energy tax credits, and moves to protect U.S. panel makers with tariffs on foreign models, the solar job count continued to grow in 2023, according to a new annual report.
The Interstate Renewable Energy Council found the U.S. “added 15,564 solar jobs in 2023 to reach 279,447 solar workers, the highest ever recorded.”
In Colorado, the nonprofit review added, solar jobs jumped 7% and 551 positions in raw numbers, to 8,177 jobs statewide. The group says its census defines a solar worker as “someone spending the majority of their time on solar-related work,” from manufacturing a panel to evaluating home energy to installing systems.
In another interesting bullet point from the report, the growing solar industry continues to be more unionized than other portions of the economy. Union workers in solar grew by 3 percentage points since 2022, to 13.4% of the overall total. “This is nearly double the percentage of unionized workers in the private sector overall and also a higher percentage than in the total U.S. workforce,” the report said.
For other state by state highlights on an interactive map, go here.
Section by Michael Booth | Reporter
Now that you’ve finished, we’ll answer your burning question: Yes, we will talk battery recycling at SunFest. Also, plastic chip bags and styrofoam packing peanuts. Go ahead, try to stump us. Let’s figure this future out together.
— Michael & John
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