Biodiversity

Birds, Citizen Science & You

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Seth has been working in various African countries recently, and is somewhere in Kenya at this moment, for work. There is a school in the vicinity, with these signs. We have not yet had the chance to hear any details about the school, but these signs anyway say most of what we might want to know.

His work, related to forest management, clearly intersects with his longstanding interest in birds, strengthened by his three years working at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. That period coincides with our learning about citizen science and in the years since we have shared many stories from the field.

The pictures arrived from Kenya just as this initiative between the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the New York Times comes to my attention, which you might find interesting:

Mike McQuade

Go Birding With The Times

Our understanding of birds has been profoundly shaped by the work of everyday people. After all, anyone can step outside and pay attention to an untamed world swooping above. Continue reading →

Give It Up For Oysters

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Among the ocean’s best filter feeders, one oyster cleans 50 gallons of water per day. Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

We have linked to stories about the environmental services that oysters provide, as well as the environmental activists who leverage those services; today a riff on those topics:

Stefanie Bassett and Elizabeth Peeples left their city lives behind to raise mollusks.

The Little Ram Oyster Co., a farm of 2 million oysters on the North Fork of Long Island, started with a Groupon.

To celebrate a friend’s birthday in the summer of 2017, Stefanie Bassett and Elizabeth Peeples joined eight other enthusiasts in Long Island City to learn how to shuck oysters at a discount. The Brooklyn couple, who knew each other from middle school in Columbia, Md., always had a love for the delicacy. But as they laughed with their friends and fumbled with their oyster knives, they also listened intently as an instructor explained the history and magic of the mollusks.

Ms. Bassett and Ms. Peeples prepare oyster cages to be put into the water. Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

“The thing that drew our attention was the positive environmental impact oysters have,” said Ms. Bassett, 42.

Among the ocean’s best filter feeders, one oyster cleans 50 gallons of water per day. New York was once known as “the Big Oyster,” but over-harvesting and poor water quality wiped out the population by the 21st century. The couple learned about efforts to bring them back to the harbor. Continue reading →

Weed Is A Weed Is A Weed

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Weeds are classified subject to norms, we have read; thanks to Rivka Galchen for reminding us, and reference to this book:

What Is a Weed?

The names we call plants say more about us than they do about the greenery that surrounds us.

Steve Brill’s first stop was the greenery behind the bike racks. Brill, who is known as Wildman Steve, picked up a weed with heart-shaped seed pods and a small, four-petalled white flower. About thirty of us were gathered for a three-hour foraging tour through Prospect Park, in Brooklyn.

Illustration by Karlotta Freier

The plant was shepherd’s purse, a name that references the seed pods’ resemblance to the containers shepherds used to make from the bladders of sheep. “It’s in the mustard family,” Brill said. “Most all of the flowers in the mustard family are four petals in the shape of a cross.” He encouraged everyone to take a bite, and to tell him what vegetable it tasted like. Continue reading →

Better Living Through Birding, Christian Cooper’s Forthcoming Book

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Wesley Allsbrook

Christian Cooper, an American science writer, is author of the forthcoming book (below left) from which the following essay in the New York Times is adapted:

Three Years After a Fateful Day in Central Park, Birding Continues to Change My Life

Early in the morning of May 25, 2020, I biked from my apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to Central Park to go birding in the Ramble. Despite the uncertainties of the time — New Yorkers were living in a hot spot of the raging Covid pandemic, with no vaccine in sight — I strove to start this warm, sunlit Memorial Day on a happy note by wandering my favorite urban woodlands in search of migrating songbirds.

I was focused on the end-of-season hunt for a mourning warbler, a small yellow and gray skulking bird that’s difficult to spot and relatively rare. I hadn’t yet seen one that year.

Visiting the park in the morning to look for birds has long been a springtime routine for me. I wake before sunrise and grab my Swarovski binoculars — a 50th-birthday present from my father — and head out the door. Continue reading →

11 Years, 11 Months & 11 Days Later

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Mermaid (now in Escazu, Costa Rica), handcrafted by Rock Bottom from driftwood in Port Antonio, Jamaica

June 15, 2011 was the day we first posted on this platform, and while we have evolved since then we have remained constant and consistent in a few ways. In the daily search for something worth sharing, photos of birds from around the world have been the most constant–as in, every day since the first photo was shared by this old friend who got us started on that daily routine. Thank you, Vijaykumar, for a healthy habit-formation.

Consistent have been the shared convictions that environmental conservation, no matter how bleak the news, is worth our effort.

Maroon shaman mask with third eye for healing power (now in Ithaca, NY USA), handcrafted by Rock Bottom from driftwood in Port Antonio, Jamaica

Plenty more constantly interesting sub-topics like books and libraries, seemingly unrelated to the environment, have been the focus of daily posts; but they are related. As is artisan production, riffed upon many times in these pages, especially now that it is the focus of our day jobs.

So today, heading toward the twelve year mark posting here, a nod to an artisan named Rock Bottom. He carves driftwood in Port Antonio, Jamaica.

There is an effort in that part of Jamaica to revive and strengthen traditional crafts, and the work of Rock Bottom is a model for what we can hope to see more of. My hope is that the amazing engine of economic activity that Jamaica’s tourism sector represents will valorize his work and the work of others akin to his.

Sea Cucumbers Working Overtime

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Diagram of a test project in Italy in which sea cucumbers cleaned up excrement from farmed mussels. GROSSO ET AL.

A topic that rarely, if ever, has made our pages, the sea cucumber’s moment in the spotlight has arrived:

A sea cucumber near Mindoro Island in the Philippines. IMAGEBROKER / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Are Sea Cucumbers a Cleanup Solution to Fish Farm Pollution?

Seafood farm operators are breeding and deploying sea cucumbers to vacuum up the massive amounts of fish waste that pose a major problem for their industry. It is part of an effort to redesign fish farms with multiple species so that they work more like natural ecosystems.

Sea bass at a fish farm in the Adriatic Sea off the coast of Slovenia. WATERFRAME / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Off the coast of the Hawaiian Island of Kauai, an underwater metropolis bustles. Sea turtles glide lazily through the surf while schools of fluorescent yellow butterflyfish weave between basketball-size sea urchins and sharp corals.

But Dave Anderson isn’t distracted by the otherworldly charm of the coral reef — he’s here on a mission. Around 70 feet below the surface, he finds his prize: a red sea cucumber. Continue reading →

Trees Are Always Welcome In Our Pages

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The notion that clear-cutting can be counteracted by the planting of trees is a political product of the timber industry.Photograph © Robert Adams / Fraenkel Gallery

Jill Lepore gives us a 30-minute read on a topic we have linked to more times than any topic other than birds:

What We Owe Our Trees

Forests fed us, housed us, and made our way of life possible. But they can’t save us if we can’t save them.

The woods I know best, love best, are made of Northern hardwoods, sugar maple and white ash, timber-tall; black and yellow birch, tiger-skinned; seedlings and saplings of blighted beech and striped maple creeping up, knock-kneed, from a forest floor of princess pine and Christmas fern, shag-rugged. White-tailed deer dart through softwood stands of pine and hemlock, bucks and does, the last leaping fawn, leaving tracks that look like tiny human lungs, trails that people can only ever see in the snow, even though, long after snowmelt, dogs can smell them, tracking, snuffling, shuddering with the thrill of the hunt and noshing on deer scat for dog treats. Continue reading →

The Bathysphere Book, Reviewed

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When a book like this comes along, take in what the review has to say, maybe read a second opinion, then go find a copy from any of the several independent booksellers offering it:

In “The Bathysphere Book,” Brad Fox chronicles the fascinating Depression-era ocean explorations of William Beebe.

Wildlife Conservation Society Archives

Consider the siphonophore. An inhabitant of the lightless ocean, it looks like a single organism, but is actually a collection of minute creatures, each with its own purpose, working in harmony to move, to eat, to stay alive. They seem impossible but they are real. In 1930 William Beebe was 3,000 feet underwater in a bathysphere, an early deep-sea submersible, when he spotted a huge one: a writhing 20-yard mass whose pale magenta shone impossibly against the absolute blackness of the water. As you can imagine, it made an impression.

Wildlife Conservation Society Archives

“The siphonophore mind, Beebe thought, asks us to rethink our individuality, to consider our epidermis as only one way to measure the extent of our bodies,” writes Brad Fox in “The Bathysphere Book,” a hypnotic new account of Beebe’s Depression-era underwater exploration. “In that light, our furious competition, our back-stabbing and fights over resources, is nonsense. Better we work together, getting closer and closer, more finely attuned to each other’s needs until we are indistinguishable.” Continue reading →

Butterfly Origin Story

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A blue morpho butterfly sits on a leaf. A new study finds that butterflies likely originated somewhere in western North America or Central America around 100 million years ago. Kristen Grace/Florida Museum

It is almost a certainty that if you visit Costa Rica you will see the blue morpho fluttering by somewhere. And you may be in the location of its origin story:

Butterflies originated in North America after splitting from moths, new study suggests

Akito Kawahara remembers being eight years old when he went on a special tour of the insect collection at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He marveled at the vast array of pinned bugs before stopping in front of a large picture of the butterfly family tree.

A red lacewing butterfly perches on a plant. Rachit Pratap Singh

A number of spots on that tree, he saw, were curiously blank.

“Just looking at it, realizing that scientists at these museums still don’t know these basic things — I’ll never forget that day,” Kawahara says.

That moment sparked a lifelong passion in Kawahara to fill in those blanks and determine where these charismatic insects originated. Now, he’s gotten a little closer to an answer. His latest research shows that butterflies probably first flapped their wings in present-day western North America or Central America. Continue reading →

What Does Positive & Progressive Permitting Look Like?

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We have seen the Center for Biological Diversity mentioned in his newsletters before, but this week Bill McKibben links to this recently released document. The Center offers a positive and progressive consideration of priorities we should give to permitting renewable energy, contrasting efforts to gut regulatory protections related to fossil fuel permitting highlighted in his current newsletter:

Introduction

It is indisputable that the climate emergency requires the United States to rapidly transform its majority fossil energy system to 100% clean and renewable energy.

Distributed solar on rooftops alone can generate a significant portion of our energy demands while also bringing key benefits like resilience, local job generation, and avoided wildlife impacts. Once distributed energy is maximized, building renewables on top of parking lots and canals as additional built surfaces can fill the remaining gap in our current energy demand. Prioritizing these sites for renewable energy can avoid the community impacts and bottlenecks associated large-scale transmission construction.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent sixth synthesis report makes absolutely clear that an unprecedented bold transition to renewable energy with an equally aggressive effort to halt new fossil fuel development and phase out existing fossil fuel usage is absolutely vital to avoiding the most catastrophic consequences of climate change (1). This necessary transformation presents a tremendous opportunity to pursue a far more just path forward—one that ends the status quo entrenchment of the fossil fuel industry; empowers federal agencies to use their authorities to accelerate the transitions to a justly sourced, justly implemented, resilient, and equitable power system; actualizes the principles of environmental justice; and preserves our core environmental laws. Continue reading →

Reversal Of Absurd Destruction Counts As Progress in Brazil’s Amazon

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An aerial view shows a deforested area during an operation to combat deforestation at the Cachoeira Seca indigenous reserve, in Uruara, Para State, Brazil January 19, 2023. REUTERS/Ueslei Marcelino

What counts as good news now in one part of the world is simply a reversal of absurd destruction trends of recent years. Without minimizing its importance we can acknowledge that a positive reversal is a low bar for what needs to be accomplished:

Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon falls 68% in April, first major drop under Lula

SAO PAULO, May 12 (Reuters) – Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest fell 68% in April from the previous year, preliminary government data showed on Friday, a positive reading for President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva as it represents the first major drop under his watch. Continue reading →

About That Bloom

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Figueroa Mountain. April, 2023.

We had a quick look at this phenomenon recently, but Dana Goodyear is just the person to give it this depth of follow up that is worth a read and luxuriant gazing:

Point Buchon Trail, Montaña de Oro State Park. February, 2023.

The Superbloom Is a Glimpse of California’s Past

This year’s rains reversed, temporarily, more than a decade of catastrophic drought. Some of the seeds that caused the bloom have lain dormant for years.

This winter, it rained in California. Ten inches in San Francisco in the ten days after Christmas alone. Thirty-one atmospheric rivers—columns of vapor that move water from the tropics. Record-breaking snow at Mammoth Lakes. Los Angeles measured its wettest year on record since 2004-05, the year I moved here.

Carrizo Plain National Monument. April, 2023.

My memories from that first winter are of driving in a rental car on slick gray roads, weaving around Jurassic-looking fallen palm fronds; my elderly neighbor calling, terrified, as the water rushed from my basement office toward her house; a picture on the front page of the paper showing a swimming pool sliding off a hill.

Pinnacles National Park. April, 2023.

People hunkered down; red tags went up, flagging damaged buildings. I had left all my sweaters in New York, and froze. I learned the city through a veil of rain. Looking at the mountains, downtown is to the right, and the coast is to the left.

By April, the rain had stopped, and nasturtiums, not muddy rivers, were cascading down the hillsides. Seussian red bottlebrush trees and violet jacarandas made the days vivid, and at night the white blooms emanated perfume.

So this was Los Angeles: abundant, intoxicating, unmoored. It must have been a Superbloom, though I don’t remember anyone calling it that then. I didn’t know that it would be eighteen years before I would see this Los Angeles again. Continue reading →

The Lab Of Peter Girguis

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Giant tubeworms take up chemicals from a hydrothermal vent 6,200 feet deep in the Gulf of California (the Girguis lab is world-renowned for research on these worms). Photograph courtesy of the Schmidt Ocean Institute

Our thanks to Veronique Greenwood (after a few years’ absence from our notice) for her most recent article in Harvard Magazine:

Top: a remote dive at Emery Knoll, a deepwater reef off Southern California, reveals crabs, sponges, and corals. Bottom: a rare sighting of the massive seven-arm octopus, Haliphron atlanticus. Photographs courtesy of the Schmidt Ocean Institute

Peter Girguis on terra firma in the lab. Photograph by Jim Harrison

Plumbing the Deep Sea

Peter Girguis probes life on the ocean floor

In a cavernous underground space behind Harvard’s Biological Laboratories, biochemist Peter Girguis frowns at the pressure vessel in his hand. The machined titanium cylinder, about the size of a French press, gleams as he works to release the cap, and he chuckles at his own stubbornness. He could probably find a tool to loosen it, he remarks. Continue reading →

Bringing Back Peat

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Peatland and taiga forest in northern Finland. NATURE PICTURE LIBRARY / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

It has been a year since we linked to a peat-in-place story, of which there cannot be too many (so thank you, Yale e360):

Tero Mustonen. GOLDMAN ENVIRONMENTAL PRIZE

Finland Drained Its Peatlands. He’s Helping Bring Them Back

Tero Mustonen has led a successful effort to restore roughly 80 areas of ecologically critical peatlands across his native Finland. In an interview, he talks about the importance of bringing Indigenous knowledge to rewilding initiatives in far northern regions and beyond.

Until a century ago, almost a third of Finland was covered in pristine peatlands, which comprise one of the Earth’s largest and most important carbon sinks. Since then, however, half of Finnish peatlands have been strip-mined for fuel or drained to make room for forest plantations. Continue reading →

Galápagos Reef Discovery, Deep

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The video is worth a minute of your time, and the short article that follows is as close as we get to nature-related good news these days. Our thanks, as always, to Yale e360:

Pristine Deep-Sea Reef Discovered in the Galápagos

The newly discovered deep-sea reef in the Galápagos Marine Reserve. WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION

In Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands, where ocean warming has decimated shallow-water reefs, scientists have discovered a healthy, sprawling coral reef hidden deep under the sea.

“This newly discovered reef is potentially an area of global significance,” Michelle Taylor of the University of Essex, co-lead of the expedition, said in a statement. It is “a site we can monitor over time to see how a pristine habitat evolves with our current climate crisis.” Continue reading →

The Forest Gives Much

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Freshly harvested logs from the Menominee Forest in Keshena, Wis., marked with color to indicate each log’s grade.

Sustainable forestry is a long-running topic in these pages over the years. The previous times we have linked to Cara Buckley stories we have been enriched by the humanity in environmental stories, so here we combine her unique talent to the topic of forestry:

The Giving Forest

The Menominee tribe has sustainably logged its forest in Wisconsin for 160 years. But that careful balance faces a crisis: too many trees and too few loggers.

A tree marked for cutting. The Menominee harvest only trees that are sick and dying or those that have fallen naturally

MENOMINEE COUNTY, Wis. — Amid the sprawling farmlands of northeast Wisconsin, the Menominee forest feels like an elixir, and a marvel. Its trees press in, towering and close, softening the air, a dense emerald wilderness that’s home to wolves, bears, otters, warblers and hawks, and that shows little hint of human hands.

Yet over the last 160 years, much of this forest has been chopped down and regrown nearly three times. The Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin, its stewards, have pulled nearly two hundred million cubic feet of timber from this land since 1854 — white pine cut into museum displays and hard maple made into basketball courts for the Olympics. Continue reading →

California’s Wildflower Bloom Boom

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People view fields of flowers at Carrizo Plain National Monument, California’s largest remaining grassland.
Claire Harbage/NPR

When lemons are plentiful, make the best of it:

California’s destructively wet winter has a bright side. You’ll want to see it

A benefit of California’s wet winter is what is known as a superbloom. Flowers including purple phacelia, yellow goldfields, hillside daisies and tidy tips grow at Carrizo Plain National Monument. Claire Harbage/NPR

CARRIZO PLAIN NATIONAL MONUMENT, Calif. — The roads are still rutted where rainwater carved them and farms are still flooded down the valley, but here in California’s largest remaining grassland, the benefits of the state’s destructively wet winter are on full display.

And they’re spectacular.

Wildflowers — yellow, purple, blue and orange — are splattered across the landscape in sweeps and pools like a clumsy airbrush painting.

Flowers are splattered across the landscape at Carrizo Plain. Claire Harbage/NPR

A superbloom. Continue reading →

Tagging Large Land Animals

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The team secure a darted rhino with nylon rope, then take its temperature and use a pulsemeter to monitor its heart rate and blood oxygenation

We have previous links to articles on tagging animals, but few land animals this big:

How to tag a rhino? Use tech, tact … and plenty of caution – a photo essay

Fewer than 2,000 rhino remain in Kenya, and the country’s wildlife service needs to keep tabs on them to make sure they thrive. It’s a major undertaking, involving a helicopter, 4x4s and a lot of rangers

Here comes a chopper … a helicopter is used to dart the highly aggressive black rhino

Kenya has the world’s third largest rhinoceros population: a total of 1,890 including 966 black rhinos, 922 southern white and two northern white. But how to keep track of them and ensure the species are thriving? Every two or three years, Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) carries out an ear-notching exercise in all rhino sanctuaries in the country to ensure that at least 60% of the animals are uniquely identifiable. Continue reading →

Pesticide Practicalities

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The Asahi Shimbun, via Getty Images

Our thanks, as always, to Margaret Renkl:

Long Live the Fireflies (and the Wildflowers and Mosquitoes, Too)

NASHVILLE — The day we moved into this house, 28 years ago next month, a thunderstorm knocked out the power late in the day. My husband was returning the rental van. Our 3-year-old was safely tucked into his old bed in his new room. As night began to fall in the silent house, I sat down on the sofa to cry. Continue reading →

Planting For Foraging

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Picking too many fiddleheads from a single ostrich fern plant can reduce its productivity. Jared Rosenbaum, a field botanist, never harvests more than one or two from any individual plant. (Also, cooking with fiddleheads can be toxic, so be sure to wash them well and never eat them raw: Always boil them before you sauté or cook them in any other way.) Jared Rosenbaum/Wild Ridge Plants

Margaret Roach delivers the goods when we need a dose of useful plant life information:

Why It’s Better to Plant Wild Greens Than to Forage for Them

This spring, don’t forage for wild edible plants. Instead, welcome them into your garden.

Jared Rosenbaum knows the primal thrill of foraging — a sense of interdependence with the natural world that he wants his son to experience, too.

But as a field botanist, he also understands that foraging is one of the many pressures on native-plant populations. And he has a proposition for gardeners: What if we gave back to the wild edible plants that tempt us on our springtime woodland hikes, by welcoming them into the landscapes we cultivate?

For a fleeting moment each spring, wild leeks (otherwise known as ramps) are a star of restaurant menus, creating a demand that has intensified the pressure on wild populations. Jared Rosenbaum/Wild Ridge Plants

It’s one layer of the habitat restoration and ecological design inspiration that he and his wife, Rachel Mackow, provide to clients of Wild Ridge Plants, in rural Pohatcong Township, N.J. And it’s reflected in many of their mail-order nursery’s plant choices, too.

In Mr. Rosenbaum’s recent book, “Wild Plant Culture: A Guide to Restoring Edible and Medicinal Native Plant Communities,” he revisits that idea: “The time has come to reconnect with our habitats, right where we live, work, and play,” he writes. “Not as museum pieces, but as vital, sustaining elements in our lives, livelihoods, and lifeways.”

That includes our gardens. Continue reading →