salutations and hello welcome to the very first episode of conservation nation with hearty i am your host hearty current before we get started just a little bit of basic information about me why i'm qualified to host the show other than my strangely good looks which is why i'm on camera you know i am a volunteer and an employee of the pittsburgh zoo and p v aquarium i am also an animal trainer and animal handler for the wild world of animals i belong to a bunch of different organizations including polar bears international conservation international and the world wildlife fund and i'm also an activist with them also the sea turtle protection project and just as of quite recently i was named the youngest member ever on a township municipal board i am on the peters township environmental quality board so because you're wondering you know what qualifies me to do the show well not much but if anything does that's about it now the show title conservation nation i wanted to leave it very wide open because conservation encompasses a whole wide range of topics and i didn't want the show to just be something narrow i wanted it to be something that i can help people with maybe help them understand the environment a little bit more so we're going to look at the word conservation a little bit more closely conservation according to the american heritage dictionary is the act or process of conserving which is really not very helpful at all so we're not forget about them also they defined it as protecting from injury or loss which is a little bit closer but still not quite what i was going for  finally the american heritage science dictionary finally got it right to find conservation as the protection preservation management or restoration of natural environments and ecological communities that inhabit them and that sounds a lot more like it that was right on the money conservation is about protecting what we have and in the case of the show in an environmental sense we need to be more aware of what we have on earth and what we need to do to protect and to conserve it was there we go now i wanted to i wanted to know what people thought conservation was in a much more candid manner so what i actually did was write it on my facebook page about what people thought that conservation was and i got a lot of really different and really interesting responses from them and i'm just going to kind of rattle off a couple of them one of them was this is one of my favorites of his very short and sweet protecting what we have on earth and that one it really hits home that's really what i was going for of course there are a lot of skeptics one person went so far as i say conservation is crap and we don't need to worry about what's going on we need to worry about moving forward well i can definitely understand a person's point of view but hopefully after a few episodes of the show assuming it will last that long your opinion will be changed a little bit because conservation in our planet is something obviously very important to us this is home this is where we live and i'm to try to educate you guys a little bit about what we can do to help save it and to help preserve it and to everyone who participated in that thank you so much for your entries and for your support so let's get down to it i want to start right off hit the ground running here with how to make your house more energy conserving and eco friendly during these cold weather months so i just have a couple simple tips here to help you guys the first one is to watch your thermostat use you want to keep it a little bit lower it takes especially people who have two story maybe even three story houses it takes a lot of energy and therefore a lot of money to keep your house heated throughout the winter if you just take your thermostat from whatever it is right now and lower it down just a couple of degrees even three degrees that a lower your monthly energy bill by five percent which especially in this economy is a lot of money and that very very important the second one is to turn down the heat during the hours that you're sleeping so what night to maybe from ten o'clock until maybe six o'clock the following morning you want to turn your thermostat down another couple of degrees that will help save you money but also i mean let's face it everybody's in bed anyway you're on to your blankets you nice and cozy and you don't need the thermostat to be up as much and by doing this you're going to save a lot more on your energy bill wear your socks very basic thing hopefully we all wear socks at some point in our lives and wearing socks will help to keep your feet warm whenever you're moving around your house even whenever you're sleeping you can wear socks but that way if you have the temperature turned down a little bit your feet aren't going to get as cold it can be a lot more comfortable and again it's going to help save on that energy bill and the less energy that we use the less coal we have to burn the less gasoline in a plant would have to use something like that and that's going to help reduce carbon emissions which is huge use your wood or gas burning fireplace wood burning fireplace especially because that that's a very very primitive but effective method of heating houses and whatever you use it would burning fireplace it's very easy it's very warm and it has much much less carbon dioxide emissions than say using your house heater the entire time or even a gas fireplace know if your power ever goes out and have a gas fireplace you'll notice that the gas fireplace still works which is very nice and that shows you that you don't need electricity to run it which means that we're not burning any more natural resources to use these gas burning fireplace also something interesting that i found out if you switch the direction of your ceiling fan you know like in the summer if you have a blowing in that you know that's that's a fan and it comes down you're getting the cold air circulating around the room but if there's a little switch on the side and if you reverse the direction it will actually take that cold air out and kind of channel what other ways other ways in the house and whenever it's up there it's going to keep your rooms a lot lot warmer which is really nice if you switch your heating and air conditioning filter it'll let your furnace work a lot more efficiently and because whenever you have a clean filter in your heater you know stuff that would keep dust and other things out of there  less energy to keep that heat pumping through your house so that's something that's very easy to do you know i'm not recommending you go and tear up your house as i don't want to be liable for that maybe consult a professional you know i think that be a good idea but if you do that and you go in and you switch out that filter it's going to require a lot less energy to heat your house and again we're always going back to life energy means less spending for you guys so really there's no downside to it you're helping the earth and you're spending less money  oh seal cracks in the doors and windows because a surprising amount of heat and energy is lost through just the small cracks and your doors and windows roughly about ten percent of your monthly energy bill is wasted energy it's wasted heat that just seeps out through the cracks so if you get you know even tape or something just put it over your windows during the winter something to cover the bottom of the door just to seal those up make them a lot more tight that's going to help again reducing the energy that's used saving you guys money switching to c f l bulbs shorter days in winter means that is going to be longer nights means that we're going to need to light bulbs a lot more to function around our houses but if you replace your regular old incandescent light bulbs with the fluorescent light bulbs first of all they look a lot cooler i mean they're you know the swirly ones and stuff and who doesn't want to swear the light bulb i mean really but also because of their shape they're able to use a lot more energy more efficiently therefore they burn brighter for a longer period of time i have one in a lamp in my room and i use that lamp every single night and that lamp has been burning on the same bulb for three years now this is a true story believe it or not i was amazed myself but it's true and again they're very cheap they cost it's either as much or even a little bit less than a regular light bulb but they use a lot less energy and they last longer so people who say you know global warming isn't happening all this stuff well regardless of what you believe this is saving you money and you can't deny that also something that has a lot more of a long term solution to this but if you actually take any plant trees along the side of your house big  will stop the wind from hitting your house as much and it'll keep your house a lot warmer in the winter all right now something neat that we have coming up next this is going to be a regular feature here on conservation nation is something called our creature features why your wonderful and charming host what some sort of animal telling you a little bit more about them in this case this is our very first one i am with an eagle owl i want to cut to that and i hope you'll like it especially these guys this is actually the largest species of i will on the planet and like i said this is a european eagle owl or eurasian eagle owl so they don't come from the united states they actually come from europe on the ground in italy france greece all those kind places all over the place and great mythology got a subpoena has an owl that she holds and it's supposed to represent wisdom and that's actually this kind of i was a european hilo i will say if you look at her face you can see that she is those eyes are so large they're not actually eyeballs are actually worthwhile by to see what that means is that her eyes are so big that she doesn't have room for muscles to move them that's why alice are able to turn their head so much now a lot of people think although they can turn the whole way around  if they did that their head with the police and i'm not very good these guys can turn a two hundred seventy degrees around or in other terms about three quarters the way around humans can only get one eighty but about one fifty of you me i'm not very flexible also called the bird of silent flight and they are basically the stealth bombers of the world on the tips of her wings she a special little feathers that actually slow down the air running over her wings so that whenever she winds you can hear her if she was going to pick up a mouse or a mole or anything or a rabbit or anything like that they would not even know that she was there until she had already picked them up unlike most owls european eagles are dire no which means that they come out in the day as opposed to the night so it's not really that awkward for her to be out right now if you look at the tops of the top of her head she has those two year tops and they're not actually her years or years a little bit more down centrally on her head behind her eyes those are used to help or camouflaging with whatever tree  branch she might be sitting on and they're also used for communication with other hours that might be nearby trees you might have heard from time to time she was hissing noise to let her know hey i'm kind of getting tired so in a minute here and you go and put her back one more very cool thing is just like with like most other prey to wear a glove whenever i'm holding her and i have to do that because again if you look at her feet she has those giant claws unlike most other birds of prey though almost actually have feathered feet and that's a that if they pick up an animal and it's still alive in that starts to bite them it's only going to get the feathers and it's not going to hurt the actual i will very much now from her size you guys might think that she weighs around fifteen pounds twenty five pounds twenty five's usually the average guess you know that we get and while i am super buff trust me i am i don't anyway well i am super buff she only weighs about three to four pounds most of her body mass that we can see is made up of feathers their bones are hollow to make it easier for flight and she has all the others on the outside to make sure that she gets enough look once again these guys are absolutely gorgeous creatures and my favorite herd of all time thank you so much for listening and i hope you enjoy the rest of the show and may i remind any fashionistas out there that khaki is the new black over my family tells me that whatever i wear that shirt i just look like a bit walking ted thanks so much for your support family anyway just because it is my first episode whenever we come back great to be covering yet another topic which is recycling so don't go anywhere we'll be right back recently increases in smuggling are putting american food sources at risk people and businesses are smuggling live birds and poultry products to sell online in specialty groceries or outdoor markets they may think they are simply catering to their customers tastes what they are really importing is trouble importing outside u s d a safeguards is not only illegal it threatens american food production smuggled poultry products or smuggled birds can bring in diseases such as exotic new castle disease or avian influenza bird flu into the u s we need your help to make sure that what is grown and raised two years they safe from foreign tests in disease if you suspect a business is importing or selling illegal birds or poultry products all the agriculture hotline at one eight hundred eight seven seven three eight three five you can make an anonymous report or find out exactly which products are prohibited america's food supply is too important to let smugglers put it at risk reports little birds and poultry products lou everybody and welcome back to conservation nation with our ticker and now like i said in this little coming up segment we're going to go very briefly over the concept of recycling but like i said i want to cover a whole broad range of topics so just to give you guys a little bit of  idea of what we're doing and i just have a few ideas i've written down here we're going to be talking about endangered species being more environmentally friendly different news in the environmental community helping your community how to be a conservationist different animals current takes on environmental issues interviews with people in the field in environmental fields plants like i said and of course fun guy but why do we need to talk about fun guy when i am such a fun guy if you got that at home give yourselves a pat on the back all right and like i said we're going to be moving into recycling next so just a couple of different things about recycling obviously as you can see here i have my trusty recycling bin have that well it's right here you'll see it soon and high school here we have our a paper recycling program there's a township wide paper recycling program that maybe not a lot of people know about but it's called  are tied by a b i t id i and there you go you can see it there and it is the paper recycling program within the township and there are specialized bins that you can pick up there that you can drop your paper oppa different places in the township one is at bauer hill elementary school there's one at the peter's township public library and also in the parking lot of our redeemer lutheran church which is which is across from bob evans on route nineteen i think that might be a sign from above i don't know hopefully not anyway the paper recycling it again helps again conserve the resources because that paper white paper only does go back into being used for more paper so less energy is used to make new paper and also that cuts down on the amount of trees that need to be harvested to make paper did it to be distributed basic things can be recycled as everybody knows glass bottles metal plastic bottles and that can all go in your regular waste management recycling bins that you have at your house probably always put your recyclables directly into the bin not in a plastic bag because if they do go into a plastic bag and then you try to recycle them the plastic bag can't be processed and so all of that stuff that you just put in the bag will not be recycled so it's very important to just put them directly into the bin and have them sitting there also you can recycle trees you can recycle other things than just paper cardboard for one thing not a lot of people know but you can recycle cardboard also different electronic things can be recycled such as computers d v d and v c r s and all kinds of other like tronics including things like car batteries and other really volatile substances that can be dangerous because what happens is if you don't recycle those they end up getting shipped somewhere like china or somewhere else in the eastern part of the world where they will just sit there and rot and then leak all those harmful chemicals so the township to the environmental quality board post specialized recycling days for no fee or a very small fee all of your life tronics will be recycled safely i guess that otherwise they just end up in a huge dump and then nothing good is going to be done with them tires as well can be recycled on these days and the next one that is coming up is the peters township cleanup day which is going to be on april twenty fourth and whatever you if you have any of those volatile items that you do want to recycle you can take them there and like i said they will be recycled also cleaned up days they're organized by the inventor i environmental quality board and they're going great great way of getting the community together and getting everybody to work together and you know try to help other community it's very easy you're just assigned a different portion of the township and then you're just expected to clean it up it's very simple to do we'll talk more about that later something else that's coming up very soon is called earth hour which is going to be march twenty seventh from seven thirty p m to eight eight to eight thirty p m and all that's asking you to do is take your lights in your house all of a tronics and turn them off for just one hour and if we can get enough people to participate actually of the entire township peters township participates in this we can save enough energy to power every single house in the district for roughly about a week depending on how well we recycle this energy and how well we conserve it so you know just to use a flashlight use candles if you do use an open flame be careful fire is hot fire is dangerous but you can prevent forest fires learn that from smokey the bear one of my idols all right now the next show that we have coming up is going to be all about endangered species so before we go i want to introduce you guys to an endangered species success story with our peregrine falcon just get along just mind over whenever people came in and started building cities and skyscrapers and things got forced out of their own and now i'm like a lot of animals and this is what makes remarkable many things that make some remarkable is that they were actually able to animals thank you so much for being with me and a very special thanks to grand jamie camera for supplying these beautiful creatures to you guys later thank you very much rocket like i said that is a great example of an endangered species coming back from the brink of extinction and i guess that in our next episode we are going to talk about it a little bit now before we go to like many other successful talk shows we're going to have a gossip section here on conservation nation it's not as juicy as some of the other shows granted  and it has to do with vegan cookies in this episode so sink your teeth into that as a way yes that was a very bad joke and if you got it at a pat on the back for you at home  starbucks well now start offering several different baked goods made to fit the vegan way of life and for those of you who don't know a vegan way of life means that you don't need any products that come from an animal so no honey no eggs no milk nothing like that and starbucks is going to start offering alternative options they are usually healthier but you know they don't taste as good i don't think but if that's what you like and that's what you like and that's great for you and they will be gluten dairy egg and not  free once again before we go just one quick thing there is still the crisis in haiti and if you did want to help out with that you can donate through the american red cross by texting haiti to nine zero nine nine nine if you have any questions comments or concerns that you would like to submit for the show you can please e mail me at h k conservation nation at g mail dot com and i will be checking that regularly so if you have any suggestions or questions i'd love to hear them and maybe even put them on the air other than that thanks so much for turning into our first episode a special thanks to grant and jamie camera from the wild world of animals for letting me use their beautiful creatures special thanks to the p t a s media department for