Mari Ness - Australian pine trees and tourist stupidities.

I always have mixed feelings when I watch the removal of Australian pine trees. On the one hand, I know that they are evil, evil trees that are destroying native wildlife and not incidentally making me cough and ruining water supplies and so on, and on the other hand, they're trees, and I can't see a tree fall without feeling upset about it.

Even evil trees that should be razed and burnt to the ground.

I do not, however, have any mixed feelings whatsoever about the group of tourists who win the award for Dumbest Tourist Stunt in 2004 (that I saw), who were trying to feed hamburgers to a manatee this afternoon.

"Mom! He's not eating them!"

"They're vegetarians," I said.

"They can't be," the mother told me in a "how dare you instruct my son" sort of voice. "They're too big to be vegetarians."

If they'd been feeding gators, I would have toppled them into the water, but I was pretty sure that all that the manatee would just continue floating there, so I stopped myself from pushing them over, repeated that manatees eat sea grass, not hamburgers, and that hamburgers are not good things to put into the water since they will attract gators which will eat tourists. (Well, we can hope. Admittedly gators have not been doing well in the eating stupid tourists department this year.)

"He's sniffing it, Mom! Look!"

Not to my surprise at all, the manatee just floated there, and, to my annoyance, not a single gator showed up to eat the tourists. I suppose that I should have tried harder to teach them interesting things about manatees, but I was trying to keep the holiday spirit alive, and left, to watch Broward County cutting down more trees.