The Dolly Parton Hair Corn Maze

0:03 Hi there, I'm Johnny Mac with five good news stories. Victoria, Australia has added three new national parks. They are Mount Boingar, the Pyrenees, and Wombat-Lurderburg. Those cover more than 250 square miles of forest and mountain country in the state center and west. It is the first significant expansion of protected land in Victoria in 15 years. The parks protect old-growth forest where greater gliders move between the gum trees at night, where powerful owls nest in the hollows, where koalas climb and platypuses work the streams. Wombat Forest Care had been pushing for the protection of the Wombat-Lurderburg area since 2010. 15 years later, Matt... executive director of Bush Heritage Australia, said what those 15 years of adequacy had been building toward.

0:50 He said, today we get to see the protection these forests deserve. Greater gliders glide between trees on a membrane that stretches from elbow to ankle. They were listed as endangered in 2022. They need old hollow trees, which is what these forests have. Back in the 1730s, a sculptor named Pietro Bracchi was working on the Trevi Fountain in Rome. You ever been there? Boy, the crowds. Yeah, it was the largest Baroque fountain in the world, the one tourists throw coins into. Pietro designed the central figure of Neptune. He oversaw the work, and then he made something else, a small marble study, a working model of the man who commissioned it all, Pope Clement XII. The piece was made around 1736, and then it disappeared. It ended up somehow in a salvage yard in Wilshire, England. Someone bought it.

1:33 They set it up in a garden there. It sat for decades until it turned up an estate, and someone brought it to an auction house to figure out what they had. Well, what you had was a 300-year-old marble sculpture by the guy that made the Trevi Fountain. Mark was one of the auctioneers. He called it an exceptionally exciting discovery. But, you know, before we get carried away, you know what they were guessing it would go for? Wrong. 300 pounds. I would have guessed a lot more. During her lifetime, Dolly Parton had established the Imagination Library, a program that sends free books to children from birth through age five. Since 1995, it has distributed more than 300 million books. It's still running today. This year, 20 farms across the U.S. and Canada carved corn mazes in Dolly's image to raise money for it. The mazes were designed by a company in Utah called The Maze Inc. Maze as in corn. M-A-I-Z-E. I see what you did there.

2:22 They have been planning for this for months as part of an annual country music series. Reba McEntire in 2023, Luke Bryan in 24, Lainey Wilson in 25, and Dolly in 26. Dolly had recorded a message for the mazes before she died that said, Get lost in this year's country music corn maze for a little fun, laughter, and a real reason to get lost. Danielle has a farm in Connecticut that hosted one of the mazes. She said the trickiest part to navigate is Dolly Parton's hair. She says, You don't know where the next little opening is going to be? I got lost several times. People are showing up in cowboy boots and dolly shirts, and the hair is the maze, and the books are still going out. That's all fun. Graham runs the Waterfowl Sanctuary in England. He got a call about a young swan with a fishing hook caught in its bill. Graham's dad helped out.

3:06 The father spread the wings. The bird hissed. The swan moved toward the kayak. The way a swan moves toward something is decided as a threat. However, Graham got past him, was able to cradle the young bird, and got the hook and freed the line. The whole thing took about three minutes, and the swan went back to its family. Someone filmed all this, and it now has 12.7 million people who have watched the clip. Somewhere in the Knuckles Mountain range of Sri Lanka in 2004, a researcher picked up a tiny, spiny mouse and realized it had never seen one quite like it. The mouse is now formally named Moose Dumbara, after the Dumbara Hills where it was found took more than 20 years to fully describe and publish. The delay wasn't for lack of effort. It was trying to get a second look at the animal. Scientists ran 1,900 trap nights in 2014 and 2015 just trying to catch or photograph the mouse again. They came up empty. The mouse would not appear. The problem, it turned out, was the baits. Researchers have been using peanut butter. That works for most mice, but Mustambara doesn't like peanut butter. They switched to burnt coconut. There's something about the charred, smoky scent specific to the Sri Lankan highlands that the mouse actually wanted, and the traps worked. Only two known specimens of the species exist. So maybe put some burnt coconut out in your yard and see what you catch. And those are your five good news stories for today. Have a good one.