Air Date: Week of May 5, 2000

In the mailbag this week, listeners write in about pink dolphins, Norse legends, and peculiar ways to celebrate trees.

Transcript

CURWOOD: Time to hear from you, our listeners.

(Music up and under)

CURWOOD: Skip Dahlgren, who listens to us on KUAR out of Little Rock, heard our interview with Sy Montgomery, sharing the truths and myths of the pink dolphins in the Amazon. "I was especially struck," he writes, "by the Boari Indian story of the dolphin who falls in love with a woman and appears in human form in the light of the full moon. This story is remarkably similar to the Norse and Celtic legends of the Silkie, a seal who changes to human form and takes a lover. I'd like to think that anyone with the surname Montgomery must have also noticed such an ethno-mythological convergence."
Our almanac last week about Arbor Day prompted some surprising responses, including this one from WOI listener Cindy Hildebrand in Ames, Iowa. "It might surprise you what some people do to celebrate Arbor Day. While many folks were busy planting trees," she writes, "this year, for the first time, Iowa had a big environmental event in late April that featured the cutting down of thousands of trees and shrubs, to the cheers of environmentalists. We are trying to save the tall grass prairie, a globally-endangered ecosystem. Tree invasion, largely caused by human fire suppression, is one of the biggest threats to prairie survival. So, hundreds of Iowans worked in the hills of western Iowa, cutting down cedars and other trees and brush, to try to save the remaining prairie on hills that were covered with prairie when Lewis and Clark first saw them."