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about Grizz’s bite.

“Have you ever seen a crocodile eat something?” Demarest asked, adding the dog only bites when told.

“He’s a lot bigger than my dog,” said one young boy.

As the youth petted Grizz, Demarest reminded them if they see a working dog they need to ask the dog’s handler before touching the dog.

“In dog years, my dog is 54,” one camper told Demarest.

Laura Burrow, with Vacaville’s Park and Recreation Department, said the camp is best for children who are 5 to 11 or 12 years old.

Wilderness Camp kicks off July 19 and includes environmental education as well as guest speakers from agencies such as the Audubon Society.

Field trips to Rush Ranch and the Yolo Basin are often included. Scholarships are available.

Camp Adobe is a partnership between the Peña Adobe Historical Society and the city of Vacaville. It was launched in 2015.

Participants get to enjoy a variety of activities at the oldest remaining structure built in Solano County. It was built in 1842.

The adobe remained in the Peña family until 1957, eventually becoming a Vacaville city park in 1965.

Sorin Williams, who will enter third grade in the next school year, arrived early enough Wednesday to see Demarest and Grizz playing.

The K-9 demonstration would be a surprise later in the morning.

This is her first time at camp. Williams said he’s made new friends, enjoyed archery, building forts and the daily hikes.

His mother, Gina Williams, said the family has hiked in the Lagoon Valley area but was not aware of the Peña Adobe side. She praised the camp, calling it “amazing” and was very impressed with how things ran so smooth the first time after the pandemic.

Campers also learned how to play Native American games from docent Armando Perez. Darlene Cooms, a fifth-generation Peña, showed them how to make corn husk dolls.

The Peña Adobe Historical Society will host “Western Day” at the park on Aug. 7.

Guests include the Congressional Gunfighters of America, a professional re-enactment group that is dedicated to preserving Old West history. The club members specialize in live entertainment and some have appeared in film and on television. They utilize period-correct costuming and weaponry.

Music will be provided by the Vacaville Acoustic Jammers under the direction of Terry and Leslie Cloper.

The event is free. For information, call 447-0518.

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Match three in order for top prize; combinations for other prizes. and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Forest Service, among many others. Their goal is to return the skippers to their former range in the Laguna Mountains and ensure they thrive.

That will take time and money. According to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report, it could cost more than $3 million and take until 2045 for the species to recover to the point where it’s no longer considered endangered.

It may seem like a lot of effort for a butterfly you’ve likely never seen or heard of, acknowledges Daniel Marschalek, an insect ecologist who studied the skippers from 2013 to 2017 while at San Diego State University. But he says the measures conservationists take to save these butterflies will help other plants and animals in their ecosystem too.

“Once you start noticing species that start to decline and maybe disappear altogether in certain areas, it should really be kind of a warning sign,” said Marschalek, who’s now an assistant professor at the University of Central Missouri. “It’s reasonably easy to document a decline. But then to figure out

K.C. Alfred/San Diego Union-Tribune/TNS Ester Chang inspects a host plant in a small habitat for the pupa.

why – because it’s usually multiple factors – and then change them, that’s kind of the difficult part.”

The Laguna Mountains skipper is a tiny critter, with a 1-inch wingspan and black wings mottled with white spots.

This butterfly subspecies was last seen in the Laguna Mountains in 1999, and no one quite knows why it vanished. Global warming and a steady dip in rainfall across the region certainly haven’t helped, as these butterflies favor wet mountain meadows. A 2019 report by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cites habitat destruction from cattle grazing as another factor.

The only Laguna Mountains skippers left live on four locations on Palomar Mountain – and nowhere else on Earth. Researchers don’t know exactly how many of these butterflies are left, but Marschalek says their current situation doesn’t bode well for their survival.

“Especially in Southern California, if you have one kind of area that a species is restricted to, eventually it’s going to burn,” he said. “It’s just a matter of time.”

Skippers aren’t capable of the long flights that have made monarch butterflies famous. That means the population on Palomar Mountain can’t travel to the Laguna Mountains – or anywhere else, for that matter.

At least not without help.

“They’re not there. And they can’t get there from Palomar on their own. So we’re going to take them,” said Paige Howorth, the zoo’s curator of invertebrates. “We feel like the habitat is ready.”

A series of conservation measures going back to the 1980s has helped preserve the skipper’s habitat by limiting cattle grazing and visitor access to the Laguna Mountains. That work is now entering a new phase, with the zoo hatching skipper eggs and rearing caterpillars in their lab, which they later plan to transport to the mountains.

It’s painstaking work, says Howorth and her team. They’ve received more than 400 eggs, which they’ve hatched into more than 300 caterpillars. Each one has a smooth body that looks a bit like a green gummy bear with a black head at the end.

Every morning, zoo staff give the caterpillars a light spritz of water to simulate dew that the larvae drink. Then the caterpillars get back to quietly munching on their favorite food source, Cleveland’s Horkelia, a small herb native to Southern California and Baja California.

As they eat away, they eject small black specks of frass. That’s entomologist-speak for poop. Howorth’s team sifts through these poop pellets for something that looks almost identical to frass but certainly isn’t – the caterpillar’s last head capsule, the tough outer layer that protects their head and which they shed while growing. The size of this capsule tells researchers what stage of development the larvae have reached.

Once the increasingly plump caterpillars stop eating and form a chrysalis, they’ll be transported to the Laguna Mountains for release. Most of the chrysalises will lay dormant until next spring, which is when the butterflies will finally emerge.

But the work doesn’t stop there. The zoo and its conservation partners will continue to monitor the new population for years to come. And they’ll keep running captive rearing programs in their lab each spring. Those reintroductions could take 10 years and cost $700,000 according to the 2019 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services report.

San Diego Zoo Wildlife’s latest financial audit shows that it spent about $24 million on research and conservation in 2020. While many of these projects are in far-flung parts of the globe, Howorth says it’s nice to let San Diegans know there’s work going on right here, including efforts to protect the Quino checkerspot and Hermes copper butterflies, both local species that are also threatened: “It’s meaningful to do something in San Diego for San Diego butterflies.”

Toll

From Page One

Surfside, in Miami Beach. “And we’re working to bring closures to families as quickly as we possibly can.”

In the grim operation of finding remains of victims, identifying them and notifying family, authorities each day often announce the new tally of the dead and then update the list of identified victims. On Sunday morning, police released the names of 10 victims found between Tuesday and Friday.

The names of the newly identified victims are: Richard Augustine, 77; Maria Gabriela Camou, 64; Edgar Gonzalez, 42; Lorenzo De Oliveira Leone, 5; Alfredo Leone, 48; Alexia Maria Pettengill Lopez Moreira, 9; Anna Sophia Pettengill Lopez Moreira, 6; Luis Sadovnic, 28; Maria Torre, 78; and Julio Cesar Velasquez, 66.

Levine Cava said that of the 90 victims extracted so far from the Champlain Towers South site, 71 have been identified publicly by police – a process that involves matching the remains with a missing person, and then notifying that person’s next of kin.

With the county last week declaring an end to hope of finding anyone alive at the site, families of the officially missing have moved into grief as well. On Sunday, Miami Beach’s Temple Menorah held a memorial service for Arnold and Myriam Notkin, friends in their 80s who married later in life after losing their spouses.

Arnie Notkin, 87, was a retired physical education teacher at Miami Beach’s Leroy D. Fienberg Elementary School, and Myriam Notkin, 81, was a retired banker. They lived in Unit 302. Though they haven’t been identified by police as victims, they were mourned Sunday by more than 300 people.

“It was amazingly attended,” said Norma Orovitz, a friend of Myriam’s from swim group at the Surfside Community Group. She described Myriam as a “dynamo” who made a habit of Facebook selfies from the ocean for friends and family on Facebook, and Arnie as a cheerful man who used to accompany his wife to swim class and sit nearby. “He was just a nice guy,” she said.

On Sunday, the search effort continued during mostly sunshine on a site that now includes both the rubble from the initial collapse and July 4 demolition of the remaining tower. The demolition was planned to prevent more rubble from falling on debris from the collapse, and the pace of the recovery process picked up after the remaining tower fell.

When Miami-Dade police release the names of the dead, they also include the date the victim was found on the site. Before the July 4 demolition, the most victims recovered in a day was six. Since then, the numbers have gone higher, with eight listed as recovered July 6 and 13 recovered on July 8.

Crews have reached the bottom of some portions of the debris pile from the 12-story building, with authorities on Sunday saying the latest layers removed over the weekend revealed vehicles from the underground parking garage.

“The pile continues to go down, well below ground level,” Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said at the briefing. “We’re at the point where we’re seeing cars in the parking garage.”

Alan Cominsky, Miami-Dade’s fire chief, confirmed the uncovering of the cars was a first for the search operation, but said that other portions of the collapsed building remain at higher levels.

He said the initial estimate of finishing the recovery operation was estimated at two to three weeks after the rescue operation ended July 7. Now, he said Sunday, there’s been enough progress that the new estimate is closer two weeks, suggesting a target of July 22.

That would still leave removal of the remaining debris once recovery of the victims concludes.

County debris removal contracts offer a rough timetable.

A July 5 solicitation by the county’s Internal Services Department for a $250,000-per-day debris-removal contract stated there were an estimated 21,000 cubic yards of “mixed evidentiary materials/debris” on the site, with about twothirds of that from the demolition that occurred the night before of the remaining tower.

“The County estimates that on average, approximately 750 [cubic yards] can be removed per day,” the solicitation read. Using that estimate, removing all of the debris in Surfside would take until early August. The solicitation stated the winning contractor may be required for 60 days – or until early September – “taking into account inclement weather conditions and any unforeseen delays due to evidence being recovered.”

While Levine Cava said 31 people remain unaccounted for, she said that number is not firm. County police investigators continue to try and confirm the whereabouts of some people on the list, while they’re confident most were in the building at the time of the overnight collapse.

Freddy Ramirez, Miami-Dade’s police director, said Sunday that of 31 missing, 26 have case numbers – a designation that reflects confidence the person was in Champlain Towers South when it collapsed, and did not escape. “There are five that have no support system behind them. We’re not sure if they’re missing people or not, because no one is reporting them” missing, he said.

Carl Juste/Miami Herald/TNS Wooden hearts with the names of victims are erected along side the photos, flowers, and other memorial items as visitors walk through the memorial site, Sunday.

Space

From Page One

increase potential customers’ confidence and interest in the flight experience, which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars for a seat.

The spaceship carrying Branson and the others detached from the carrier aircraft about 50 minutes after launch, once it reached an altitude of about 45,000 feet and a designated release point in the airspace. The ship then rocketed to suborbital space.

The craft reached a speed of Mach 3 and a maximum altitude of 53.5 miles above the Earth. The U.S. military and NASA consider space to start at 50 miles above the Earth, though the world body governing aeronautic and astronautic records, as well as other organizations, define space as 62 miles above Earth’s surface, a designation known as the Karman line.

A livestream of the mission showed the crew floating in the cabin once the craft reached space. As the ship returned to Earth, Branson – wearing sunglasses – told viewers on the livestream that it was the “experience of a lifetime.”

The ship landed back at the spaceport around 8:40 a.m. Pacific time, about 14 minutes after it detached from the carrier aircraft. Video inside the cabin showed Branson clapping at touchdown. As he emerged from the spacecraft, he pumped both arms in the air and waved to the assembled crowd.

Branson told reporters after the flight that it was impossible to describe the experience of accelerating to Mach 3 in seven to eight seconds and that the views of the Earth were “breathtaking.”

He added that “99.9% was beyond my wildest dreams.”

“It’s so thrilling when a lifetime’s dream comes true,” said Branson, who carried to space photos of his children, a woman who died but always dreamed of going to space, and a tiny image of the head of Colbert.

The flight put Branson in space ahead of billionaire rival Jeff Bezos, who is due to launch to suborbital space July 20 in a capsule developed by his Blue Origin space company. Bezos congratulated Branson and the Virgin Galactic crew in an Instagram post Sunday, adding, “Can’t wait to join the club!”

Like Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin plans to sell tickets to tourists who want to experience a few minutes of weightlessness in suborbital space. Bezos’ company is also developing a larger rocket called New Glenn intended to launch satellites, and it had hoped to win a NASA contract with Lockheed Martin, Draper and Northrop Grumman to build a lunar lander that was instead awarded to Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Sunday’s flight marks a milestone for the 17-yearold Virgin Galactic, which spent years developing its SpaceShipTwo craft and larger carrier aircraft.

Branson recently told The Associated Press that it was “very important” for potential customers to see him in the spacecraft.

After the flight, Branson also announced a charity sweepstakes for two seats aboard “one of the first” Virgin Galactic spaceflights. The sweepstakes is part of a growing trend of space contests for tourist seats aboard space vehicles – SpaceX is set to launch a private astronaut mission later this year with two contest winners aboard, and Bezos’ flight in July will include an auction winner who bid $28 million for a seat.

Virgin Galactic has said it expects to complete two more test flights before it begins flying customers to space next year.

Mike Moses, company president of space missions and safety, said everything about the flight looked “perfect in real time” and that there were “no issues whatsoever,” other than spotty transmission of audio and video from the spaceship’s cabin to the livestream. The company will do a thorough inspection of the craft and determine the date of the next flight, he said.