Fat Bear Week

0:02 Calaroga Shark Media. Hey there, I'm Johnny Mac with five good news stories. At Tuckin' Hay Farm, there's an emu named Sideneck. Sideneck lives with some alpacas. We were told that Sideneck is a large, confident bird with strong opinions about his surroundings. Are you new to the show? What do you think happened here? You guessed correctly. A handler noticed the gate was open. and saw Sideneck standing outside the gate. So the handler said, let me go get Sideneck. Well, that was a little harder. You see, Sideneck had his own opinions. This whole thing involved what you might call spirited negotiation, involving a fair amount of chasing, some wingspan deployment, and at least one moment where Sideneck knocked the handler off their feet. The alpacas, they just watched from the enclosure.

0:52 They didn't try to escape. They were like, oh, all right, whatever. Eventually, both parties had spent enough energy. Side Neck made a decision, turned around, walked back through the gate and went inside. All right. Recently, it was Fat Bear Week. You see, every fall when the salmon run ends and brown bears have to face the coming winter, they pack on some pounds. Am I celebrating Fat Bear Week? I think I've celebrated Fat Bear Month in September. Oh, my. Not much working out happening here in the basement recording podcast. Anyway, over 100,000 people vote for the fat bear. This year, it was Bear 89. Bear 89, better known as Backpack, is the fat bear. Backpack is 20 years old, which is pretty good for a wild brown bear. His mother was Holly, who won Fat Bear Week back in 2019. When Backpack was a young bear, he would cling to his mother's back, hence the nickname. At his peak this fall, Backpack weighed somewhere between 1,000 and 1,200 pounds. Yeah, always weigh yourself after you go for a run. You lose a little water weight there, Backpack, trust me. One of the park rangers described Backpack this way. He doesn't really get into drama or cause any upset in the hierarchy. He holds his own very quietly. When Sloan was seven years old, she learned that diapers are not covered by food stamps.

2:05 Families in need can get help with food, but not with diapers. Babies go through six to ten every day. That bothered her. She did something about it. She held a diaper drive five years ago. Recently, Sloan held her fifth annual drive in Phoenix. She's 12 years old. She set a goal of 22,500 diapers. What she actually collected was 30,000, packed into a U-Haul truck and delivered to Nourish Phoenix, the local org she'd been partnering with since she was seven. Nice job there. Let's head up to Maison Creek, just south of Chicago. There's a kind of fossil the researchers have been studying for a long time. The shill there preserves ancient animals in unusual detail, creatures from about 309 million years ago. when that part of Illinois was a swampy coastal delta. Well, last year, researchers from the Field Museum were working with a group of summer interns from the Women in Science program. They found a specimen that had been sitting in storage for years unidentified.

2:57 They looked closely and they found a creature unlike anything previously cataloged from that site. It was an early four-legged animal with a flattened head, a long body, and visible eye impressions still intact in the fossil remains. They named it Genoproton mesonessus. Why? The interns who made the identification, Alice and Peyton, both their moms are named Gene. So the creature became Genoproton, which means Gene's crawler. I see. It's 309 million years old. You can see where its eyes were. It was alive before the dinosaur, before the continents finished drifting apart, before almost anything you would recognize as the world today. And there it is in the museum named after Gene. Dave spent 26 years as an FBI agent. He retired, then he went looking for apples.

3:42 Not just any apples, lost apples, varieties that were grown a century ago, documented in old nursery catalogs and agricultural records, and then eventually disappeared as commercial orchards consolidated around the profitable kinds. But what happened to the Streak Pippin, the Sari Sinap, the Nero, the Kitagaski? Those have vanished. Dave started going down rabbit holes. He'd find a reference to a historic orchard in eastern Washington or western Idaho, northern Oregon, track it to an old homestead and go looking. Old trees, if they're still standing, can survive for over 100 years, and sometimes they still have some apples. Since 2012, through a nonprofit called the Lost Apple Project, he's found and recovered 30 once-lost varieties. That's awesome. He's not a botanist or a horticulturist. He's an FBI agent. But he applied his skills. You find things by looking. You look by going places. You go places because you believe there's something there.

4:34 The truth is out there, and sometimes the truth involves apples. And those are your five good news stories for today. Have an awesome day.