DAILY QUICK READ - MAY 19 , 2016

Renewable Energy "Fad" Continues In Europe.  During the last two weeks, Portugal had a 107 hour period where the country's entire electrical power demand was satisfied by renewable sources and Germany had nearly a full day of exclusively renewable electric power.

Electricity consumption in the country was fully covered by solar, wind and hydro power in an extraordinary 107-hour run that lasted from 6.45am on Saturday 7 May until 5.45pm the following Wednesday, the analysis says.

News of the zero emissions landmark comes just days after Germany announced that clean energy had powered almost all its electricity needs on Sunday 15 May, with power prices turning negative at several times in the day – effectively paying consumers to use it.

A New York urban park is going to the goats.  Damage from Super Storm Sandy left Brooklyn's Prospect Park in bad shape.  Downed trees and other storm damage led to an invasion of weeds and other invasive plants.  Instead of chemical weed agents, park officials turned to goats for help.

Prospect Park, Brooklyn’s biggest park (and the home of the borough’s only lake and zoo), was hit hard by the 2012 hurricane season, which included the deadly Hurricane Sandy.

More than 500 trees in the 585-acre park were felled during that season, and one area, known by officials as the Northeast Perimeter was hit especially hard, losing 50 trees. The rescuers are coming this summer, in an unexpected form: eight goats from upstate.

Goats have, in recent years, become a valuable tool for ridding areas of unwanted weeds, especially poison ivy and kudzu, which they appear to love. They are highly efficient weeders; very little makes them sick, including plants that are poisonous to other farm animals. They can easily scale the meager hills in places like Prospect Park -- they’ve been known to climb trees -- and they have huge appetites.

People are stupid - bison calf dies.  Tourists in Yellowstone Park picked up a bison calf that they felt was abandoned and cold.  After transporting the calf in their car to a ranger station, it turned out to be impossible to get the calf back into its herd.  

A bison calf recently had to be euthanized at Yellowstone National Park after visitors put it in the back of their car, according to park officials.

Now, many are asking, "Why?"

 "There are multiple reasons," Charissa Reid, who works for the park's public affairs office, told ABC News today. "First, we want people to understand that our rangers really made a heroic effort to return the calf to the wild. No one ever becomes a park ranger because they want to kill animals. What happened was really unfortunate."

Park rangers spent over two days trying to get the bison calf to return to a herd, but it just kept getting rejected, Reid said. She added that the calf "wouldn't eat" and kept returning to the roadway and seemed to "be very imprinted on cars and people."

Yellowstone is not a petting zoo, people.


One billion birds lost since 1970.  One third of all North American bird species face extinction.

A billion birds have disappeared from North America since 1970, and a third of bird species across the continent are threatened with extinction, a new report says.

The first State of North America's Birds report finds that of 1,154 bird species that live in and migrate among Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, 432 are of "high concern" due to low or declining populations, shrinking ranges and threats such as human-caused habitat loss, invasive predators and climate change.

Some days I just don't want to get out of bed and face the world we are creating.