Two photos of damage. Don't know what to conclude, but the neighbour's dogs are curious, so it won't be snails. Twigs too small for possums. No other animal predators here except for small rodents. This is a large NZ Meyer which has been damaged over some weeks, also for the very first time. You can see many new blossoms as it is late spring. Lots completely denuded and then they drop. Too many branches and foliage to hide in, so pruning to open it up should help.

Port O'Connor TX. I'm going with a small Texas port city behind Matagorda Island, on Matagorda Bay. Not that far from Corpus Christi by boat. I worked out of there for several years, and loved the people and the place. Just like being at home, actually. They had a shell shop, a convenience store, a library which gave me a library card, a post office, and Hurricane Junction bar. Plus assorted docks and fuel stops for boats, and the friendliest Coast Guard outpost ever, with a rollover boat. I hold the distinction, according to the Coasties, of being the only oil field vessel to fly an Earth Day flag ...Green Peace vessels not included of course. Port O'Connor Texas, was reincarnation of Indianola, "Mother of West Texas", until that town was destroyed by hurricanes back in the 1800s. Camels were imported through Indianola and taken to the southwest deserts where Americans promptly shot them. I thought it was a great idea myself....the camels, not the killing thereof.

[from Washington Post article posted earlier] "For example, before and after large storms, more bats tend to die. On warmer nights when wind speeds are lower, more have died. But researchers do not know why." OK: Point us to the papers! Not to the newspapers, but to the researchers papers! Here are just a couple of "duh" ideas about those patterns of bat deaths. Before a large storm, bats want to eat more (ingesting more per hour than typical) to compensate for unavailable hunting time during the bad weather - so they hunt more aggressively or "recklessly." But of course, subscribing to that requires a way of verifying that the bats sense the oncoming bad weather, and/or somehow respond to anticipated bad weather and food supply fluctuations. (Bears do that, don't they? I believe some humans still do.) Or, perhaps the bats' prey (forget the bats) sense the oncoming bad weather and seek cover or more stable structures, so they cluster more around the turbines, which draws in the bats and increases collision risks. After bad weather, similar ideas: bats are hungry and hunt more aggressively, and/or many bats are weakened or stressed by the weather that just passed, and regardless of how aggressively they hunt, they're just more prone to run into things. The warmer night/lower wind "anomaly" presented the biggest "duh" to me: on warmer nights with light winds, it just makes intuitive sense that more prey are out and about, thus probably more bats too. It becomes a simple case of probability - just like more people in the US are killed in car accidents around holiday times. Ahhh, the "Poshington Waste"...as trusted by some as "Faux News" is trusted by some others.

Of course, if you don't like it, it has to be a right wing conspiracy. Lol From the link I left above ~ American Council on Science and Health: "Additionally, the evidence regarding the effect of DDT on eggshell thinning among wild birds is contradictory at best. The environmentalist literature claims that the birds threatened directly by the insecticide were laying eggs with thin shells. These shells, say the environmentalists, would eventually become so fragile that the eggs would break, causing a decline in bird populations, particularly among raptors (birds of prey). In 1968 two researchers, Drs. Joseph J. Hickey and Daniel W. Anderson, reported that high concentrations of DDT were found in the eggs of wild raptor populations. The two concluded that increased eggshell fragility in peregrine falcons, bald eagles, and ospreys was due to DDT exposure.9 Dr. Joel Bitman and associates at the U.S. Department of Agriculture likewise determined that Japanese quail fed DDT produced eggs with thinner shells and lower calcium content.10 In actuality, however, declines in bird populations either had occurred before DDT was present or had occurred years after DDT’s use. A comparison of the annual Audubon Christmas Bird Counts between 1941 (pre-DDT) and 1960 (after DDT’s use had waned) reveals that at least 26 different kinds of birds became more numerous during those decades, the period of greatest DDT usage. The Audubon counts document an overall increase in birds seen per observer from 1941 to 1960, and statistical analyses of the Audubon data confirm the perceived increases. For example, only 197 bald eagles were documented in 194111; the number had increased to 891 in 1960.12 At Hawk Mountain, Pennsylvania, teams of ornithologists made daily counts of migrating raptors for over 40 years. The counts��"published annually by the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary Association��"reveal great increases in most kinds of hawks during the DDT years. The osprey counts increased as follows: in 1946, 191; in 1956, 288; in 1967, 457; and in 1972, 630.13 In 1942 Dr. Joseph Hickey��"who in 1968 would blame DDT for bird population decline��"reported that 70 per-cent of the eastern osprey population had been killed by pole traps around fish hatcheries.14 That same year, before DDT came into use, Hickey noted a decline in the population of peregrine falcons.15 Other observers also documented that the great peregrine decline in the eastern United States occurred long before any DDT was present in the environment.16,17 In Canada peregrines were observed to be “reproducing normally” in the 1960s even though their tissues contained 30 times more DDT than did the tissues of the midwestern peregrines allegedly being extirpated by the chemical.18 And in Great Britain, in 1969, a three-year government study noted that the decline of peregrine falcons in Britain had ended in 1966 even though DDT levels were as abundant as ever. The British study concluded that “There is no close correlation between the decline in population of predatory birds, particularly the peregrine falcon and the sparrow hawk, and the use of DDT.”19 In addition, later research refuted the original studies that had pointed to DDT as a cause for eggshell thinning. After reassessing their findings using more modern methodology, Drs. Hickey and Anderson admitted that the egg extracts they had studied contained little or no DDT and said they were now pursuing PCBs, chemicals used as capacitor insulators, as the culprit.20 When carefully reviewed, Dr. Bitman’s study revealed that the quail in the study were fed a diet with a calcium content of only 0.56 percent (a normal quail diet consists of 2.7 percent calcium). Calcium deficiency is a known cause of thin eggshells.21��"23 After much criticism, Bitman repeated the test, this time with sufficient calcium levels. The birds produced eggs without thinned shells.24 After many years of carefully controlled feeding experiments, Dr. M. L. Scott and associates of the Department of Poultry Science at Cornell University “found no tremors, no mortality, no thinning of eggshells and no interference with reproduction caused by levels of DDT which were as high as those reported to be present in most of the wild birds where ‘catastrophic’ decreases in shell quality and reproduction have been claimed.”23 In fact, thinning eggshells can have many causes, including season of the year, nutrition (in particular insufficient calcium, phosphorus, vitamin D, and manganese), temperature rise, type of soil, and breeding conditions (e.g., sunlight and crowding)." Al