Author: Seth Inman

Op-Ed: US National Protected Lands at Risk

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Image via http://www.garyengbergoutdoors.com

From the New York Times, president of the Wilderness Society Jamie Williams writes an opinion editorial titled “Don’t Give Away Our Wildlife Refuges.” Perhaps given the global crisis I read the final word as refugees accidentally, so I was expecting something else entirely – maybe animals that are displaced by climate change. Instead, I learned that there is a relatively strong segment of the US Congress and state legislatures that are constantly trying to undermine the country’s system of public protected lands, sometimes in ways that could lead to the park or refuge’s destruction:

Tucked into the fiscal relief package for Puerto Rico this spring was a provision to give away a national treasure that belongs to all Americans — 3,100 acres of the Vieques National Wildlife Refuge. The proposal had nothing to do with the economic recovery of Puerto Rico. But it would have handed an important victory to extremists in Congress and state legislatures who want to grab national lands and turn them over to the states to be sold or leased.

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Feeding Fish with Methane?

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Our last post on farmed fish revolved around grubs – dried black soldier fly larvae – as an alternative and more sustainable feed in aquaculture. Today I learned about yet another method for feeding fish that doesn’t involve catching wild fish or using petroleum-reliant grains, and actually helps control a problematic greenhouse gas, methane. Kristine Wong writes for Civil Eats, a website that acts as a “daily news source for critical thought about the American food system”:

Wild seafood is disappearing rapidly and many consumers have turned to farmed fish as a way to help reverse the trend. But finding a sustainable source of food for carnivorous fish such as salmon and tuna—which rank as the second and third most popular types of seafood in America—has been a persistent challenge for aquaculture producers.

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Adjutant Storks and their Conservation Brigade

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A rag picker looks for valuables among a group of Greater Adjutant Storks in a garbage dump site near Deepor Beel Wildlife Sanctuary in Assam. Photo by Ritu Raj Konwar, via The Hindu

Looking at the photo above, you may not see much to like in the Greater Adjutant, a type of stork found primarily in northern India and parts of Cambodia. But these big birds are important scavengers in their ecosystem, helping to break down dead animals. In this way they’re like vultures, a similarly-maligned group of relatively unattractive birds. As you’ll read below, many rural communities in India historically did not welcome the Greater Adjutant, which is classified as endangered by the IUCN. But storks, like other large avian families such as vulture and cranes, are not doing too well on a global scale: of the nineteen species of stork, the IUCN labels fifteen of their population trends as decreasing; four are endangered, while two are near-threatened and three are vulnerable. All of which makes the news from the state of Assam in India even more heartening:

DADARA, INDIA — On a cloudy day in July, in a remote village in northeastern India, Charu Das excitedly imitates the awkward movements of a stork with her hands.

In a few months, the greater adjutant stork—called hargilla, which means “swallower of bones” in Sanskrit—will descend on this hamlet, situated in Assam’s Brahmaputra Valley, to breed in large numbers.

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Car-sharing Greatly Reduces Carbon-Output

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Image via car2go.com

I’ve never owned a car myself, because friends and family have always had one. While a student at Cornell, a couple of my friends used the Zipcar service, and that’s something I’d have used if I didn’t have the opportunity to borrow a car or share a ride with housemates for grocery shopping every other week (when I didn’t bike or bus to the store instead). But you don’t need to do any math to realize that a car-sharing service is almost certainly going to result in a reduction of carbon dioxide output, even if it’s not as environmentally friendly as biking or taking public transportation. Conservation Magazine reports on a new study quantifying the use of the Car2go service in five cities over three years:

Car-sharing is quickly gaining popularity in cities around the world. Proponents say that it’s a green way to get around town. In a report published in July, researchers calculated car-sharing’s precise impact by analyzing the car-share service car2go in five North American cities. Each car2go eliminated up to 11 privately-owned vehicles from the roads and prevented 10 to 14 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, they found.

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You’ve Seen Bird Cams – How About a Salmon Cam?

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Resolution is low, probably due to poor internet where the fish is and where I am, but you can see a coho, just like they say you might when watching the cam!

Resolution is low, probably due to poor internet where the fish is and where I am, but you can see a coho, just like they say you might when watching the cam!

We’ve shared various of the “bird cam” projects here before: websites, often run by universities like Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology, that host a live-streaming video of a nest somewhere so that people around the world with internet can tune in to the parent or chicks’ activities at any time of day. In some circles, similar videos of cats are also available. Now, not necessarily for the first time but at least the first I’ve heard of personally, there’s a live-streaming site of a real-life stream owned by The Nature Conservancy (I’m surprised their blog writers didn’t pun their way into that one). Matt Miller and Chris Babcock write about the new Salmon Cam:

Welcome to Salmon Cam, where you can enjoy the underwater happenings of a California salmon river throughout the day, on your computer or device.

The Salmon Cam is located in a tributary creek on The Nature Conservancy’s Shasta Big Springs Ranch. The camera is powered on in daylight hours (currently between 7 am and 7 pm Pacific time). Throughout the season, it will provide a view of migrating Chinook and coho salmon and steelhead trout.

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Panthera onca

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video taken by author on August 5th

Chan Chich is known for being pretty much the best place in Belize to spot a jaguar (scientific name, Panthera onca) in the wild, given the Lodge’s huge amount of protected land (30,000 acres) adjacent to hundreds of thousands of acres similarly preserved, or under government conservation that together form the international Jaguar Corridor Initiative.

The word Panthera comes from the ancient Greek pánthēr (πάνθηρ), which essentially means “predator of everything,” and is a scientific genus comprised of the five big cat species in the world: snow leopards, tigers, lions, jaguars, and leopards. The latter four of these are the only cats that can roar, given morphological differences in their bones and throat.

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Tropical Kingbirds Make Good Parents, Part Two

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Yesterday I wrote and shared a video about this particular flycatcher’s protective nature, but it’s important to note that this behavior isn’t limited solely to the Tropical Kingbird. Neither is the rigorous feeding displayed in the video below. Most birds take good care of their young, whether by bringing meals every couple minutes or by picking up their poop and depositing it away from the nest – which you can see the parent kingbird do at 00:30 and 2:31. I apologize for publishing this in low resolution and pixelating the cuteness, but it’s the best one can do when off-grid in the middle of the Belizean jungle!

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Tropical Kingbirds Make Good Parents, Part One

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Just a few days ago, I was working from my laptop in one of the Chan Chich Lodge common areas when I saw an Ocellated Turkey on the road – not a peculiar sight at all – that walked a few steps before suddenly doing a swift yet panicked pirouette  – a slightly less usual occurrence, in my brief experience with the scintillant species. I grabbed my camera, which doesn’t leave my side here at the Lodge, and recorded the following video, in which the turkey gave a new meaning to the chicken-dance, albeit as an unwilling partner:

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Big Numbers for eBird this Summer

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Starting in May, eBird hit a big milestone: 11.8 million bird sightings in that month alone – the same amount of sightings the citizen science database collected in the first five years it existed. Participation in recent years had shot up enough to make that sort of number, and these sorts of maps, possible. Then, on June 17th, the 333,333,333th checklist was submitted to eBird from a participant in Illinois. A third of a billion records submitted by just over three-hundred thousand different people around the world since the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Audubon partnered to make it possible for people to easily digitize their bird sighting checklists – that amounts to an average of a thousand-and-fifty checklists per eBirder!

At the end of last month, eBird saw another big number, with a million bird photos archived in the Cornell Lab’s Macaulay Library through the new tool allowing users to attach images to their checklists. And this week, the app Merlin got downloaded by its millionth user since it was launched for iPhones in January 2014 (and a bit later on Android phones). But eBird, Merlin, and the Macaulay Library aren’t the only ones reaching milestones this summer. Continue reading →

Jumping Mobula Rays at Villa del Faro

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A few weeks ago I wrote about the dawn rays at Villa del Faro, when I saw the jumping fish coming out of the water and slap down in almost-graceful belly flops. I finally got a little footage of the interesting behavior in the video above, and I found an article from BBC Earth that covers the topic – in the Gulf of California, no less – while still not providing an explanation for why the rays jump like they do:

Soaring high above the waves as easily as a bird, mobula rays appear perfectly designed for this astonishing aerobatic display.

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Good Bag News from England

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Image via Pinterest

Last year in October, a five pence charge (around seven US cents) for plastic bags at supermarkets was introduced to discourage shoppers from using the wasteful and unnecessary receptacles – and prevent pollution at the same time. With this extra cost, use of the bags dropped by over 85%, according to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. But England hasn’t led the charge (pun intended) in this effort: Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all successfully employed the 5p cost prior. Rebecca Smithers reports for The Guardian:

Retailers with 250 or more full-time equivalent employees have to charge a minimum of 5p for the bags they provide for shopping in stores and for deliveries, but smaller shops and paper bags are not included. There are also exemptions for some goods, such as raw meat and fish, prescription medicines, seeds and flowers and live fish.

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American Coots

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The title may be reminiscent of recent movies like “American Sniper,” or “American Hustle,” or slightly older ones such as “American Psycho” and “American Beauty.” But as the video suggests, the American Coot is a type of bird, a wading species in a family called Rallidae, which most non-birders probably haven’t heard of because the birds are typically either near water or hiding in dense vegetation. Coots, along with rails, gallinules, and crakes, make up the Rallidae family, and all these types of birds like to stay on the ground, very rarely flying or venturing into trees unless it helps escape a predator. They’re more closely related to cranes than to ducks.

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New Zealand Plans to Eliminate Invasive Mammals

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Illustration of a Brown Kiwi chick. A History of the Birds of New Zealand. 2nd ed. by W.L. Buller (London, 1888). page 326 via WikiMedia Commons

It is not surprising that one of the nations that stands to lose the most from invasive mammals is also the first country in the world to announce its ambitious plan to remove them all by 2050, but the islands of New Zealand have a lot of work ahead of them to eradicate animals like rats, stoats, and possums – around nineteen and a half million US dollars worth of work, which will be the government investment in a new public-private joint venture called Predator Free New Zealand Limited . And now that deforestation has been controlled better, it’s time to protect the country’s wildlife another way. The kiwi illustrated above, for example, is one of five species in New Zealand, all of which are threatened or endangered, or critically endangered, thanks to predation by invasive mammals that the flightless birds can’t avoid.

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