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THE APRIL ECO-QUIZ WAS: No, it is not the "Isle of Cormorants", Mr. P.P ! It is La Isla de los Alcatraces, more commonly known as the infamous Alcatraz. It was named so by Spanish explorers in the late 1700s by Spanish explorers, the name referring to cormorants, or alcatraceo, whose colonies then covered it from end to end. As mentioned by the National Wildlife Federation www.nwf.org by the time of the American Civil War, Alcatraz was the site of a huge brick fort, soil was imported and leveled for parade grounds, the sides blasted into cliffs and then in the prison era, guard's families planted gardens. In the early 1970s, after activists occupied the island for 18 months to raise awareness of Native American issues, the federal government bulldozed former guards' residences into rubble. Despite all this cosmogonic destruction, cormorants and other sea birds now consider all this as their is habitat: Cormorants nest on the cliffs, western gulls nest on the flattened top of the island and black-crowned night herons nest in the dense garden vegetation gone wild. The birds even make use of the rubble. The avian breeding season on Alcatraz extends from February to the end of August. THE
MAY ECO-QUIZ IS (easy): Email your
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