Thattekad, Kerala
A Few Attenborough Minutes
When he first appeared in these pages, and each of the dozens of times since then that David Attenborough has returned, it is worth at least a few minutes of attention. Click above to go to the video or below to go to the transcript:
Amid planet’s crisis, filmmaker Sir David Attenborough’s ‘vision for the future’
Filmmaker Sir David Attenborough has been documenting the natural world since the 1950s. In his latest book and film, “A Life on Our Planet,” he offers a grave and alarming assessment about the climate crisis Earth is facing. The 94-year-old Attenborough spoke with William Brangham recently as part of our ongoing arts and culture series, Canvas. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Chestnut-headed Bee-eater
Andaman Islands
Hidden Camera, Tiger Tree Hug, Award
Sergey Gorshkov’s image of an Amur tiger, which won him the 2020 wildlife photographer of the year award.
Thanks to Mark Brown, Arts correspondent at the Guardian, for this:
Image of tiger hugging tree wins 2020 wildlife photographer award
Sergey Gorshkov left a hidden camera in a Russian forest for 11 months to capture the big cat
An image of a clearly ecstatic tigress hugging an ancient Manchurian fir tree in a remote Siberian forest has won one of the world’s most prestigious photography prizes.
It took Russian photographer Sergey Gorshkov 11 months to capture the moment using hidden cameras. His patience led to him being named 2020 wildlife photographer of the year by the Duchess of Cambridge at a ceremony at London’s Natural History Museum.
The image was selected from more than 49,000, with Roz Kidman Cox, the chair of the judging panel, calling the photograph “a unique glimpse of an intimate moment deep in a magical forest”. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Long-billed Hermit
Macaw Lodge, Costa Rica
Know GEF Through Its New Leader
Mongabay‘s Rhett A. Butler offers an engaging conversation with the new leader of GEF, who we have confidence will lead this institution to the planet’s benefit. His realization at a young age about seasonal differences in bird abundance is a good example of why programs like Celebrate Urban Birds in places where migratory birds come and go are so important. It has been too long since we last sourced from Mongabay, but today we correct that with this recorded interview (click above) and the printed version (click below):
The post-COVID opportunity for the environment: An interview with the GEF’s Carlos Manuel Rodriguez
Tropical forests in places like Costa Rica (pictured) can be an important source of livelihoods by attracting nature-oriented tourists. Photo by Rhett A. Butler.
Rhett A. Butler for Mongabay: Congratulations on the new role at the Global Environment Facility.
Rodriguez: Well, I’m very pleased and honored. I’ve been working half my professional life in government and half within the civil society in Costa Rica. I have worked very close to the GEF, including in the early days of the GEF. I was a negotiator for CBD for the Rio convention and also had the fortune to work with the government of Costa Rica in the first implementation of GEF funding in Costa Rica. Those were very interesting times, the mid-1990s.
I’m really delighted that 25 plus years after that, I’m leading this very prestigious organization. I never thought I would have that opportunity, particularly for coming from a developing country, a recipient country. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Keel-billed Toucan
Boca Tapada de San Carlos, Costa Rica
10 Minutes With Andres Amador
Credit: Wired
Wired has been on my list of source material for daily posts since early on. Technology is both correlated with and causal to conservation issues, in good and not so good ways. Today when I visited Wired, this caught my attention, instead of issues: Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Rufous-browed Wren
Baja Verapaz, Guatemala
Arborists & Urban Futures
Xuebing Du
An article by Clive Thompson we linked to in 2016 makes me wonder why today is the first time we are sharing his work since then. I remember reading a review of his book last year but did not see a fit with the themes we tend to focus on here. Urban trees, for one example, feature in our pages frequently. And trees more broadly speaking have probably been featured more than any other topic due to our mission. So our appreciation to the Atlantic for publishing this, and an added thanks for the excellent photographic accompaniments:
Trees Are Time Machines
Arborists are planting trees today that must survive decades of global warming. The health, comfort, and happiness of city dwellers hang in the balance.
City trees lead difficult lives. A lot of things are trying to kill them, particularly the trees planted on sidewalks: Tightly compacted soil with high alkaline content makes it harder for them to absorb nutrients. Tiny plots of land admit very little rainwater. They’ve got dogs peeing on them, people dropping cigarette butts nearby, and cars belching pollution.
Xuebing Du
“We’re talking about trees that are very vulnerable,” says Navé Strauss, the head of street-tree planting for New York City. His team manages the planting of new trees on streets and public rights of way; there are more than 666,000 street trees in the city, and the team plants about 16,000 new ones annually. For decades, New York arborists have tended to prefer “tough,” hardy species that thrive well against adversity—such as the London planetree, which sports grayish bark and big, maple-like leaves that offer sidewalks tons of shade.
But lately, Strauss has been looking for trees that can handle an even tougher challenge: climate change.
Xuebing Du
In the past century, the United States has heated up as much as 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Crested Caracara
Boca Tapada de San Carlos, Costa Rica
Common Octopus, Uncommon Story
My Octopus Teacher is available on Netflix
I was not avoiding it, exactly, but by night time my attention span diminishes. From a reluctant start at 7:30pm yesterday, assuming I would fall asleep less than half way through, my absorption became total from the first minute and remained so until the end. It was a compelling conclusion to a very long day. Film reviews rarely appear here, but New Scientist gives me good reason to share more than my own opinion:
My Octopus Teacher review: The strange lives of cephalopods up close
In many ways, the octopus is a tough proposition: a soft-bodied mollusc that carries the bulk of its brain in its arms, that can render itself solid without a skeleton or liquid despite its beak, that evolved separately from nearly every other organism on Earth. That otherness is at the heart of our fascination with octopuses: can we even aspire to understand something so foreign? A new Netflix documentary, My Octopus Teacher, follows one man’s attempt. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Tawny Fish-Owl
Jim Corbett National Park, Uttarakhand
A Sober Consideration Of Fire
The Bobcat Fire burns through the Angeles National Forest in Southern California on September 17. KYLE GRILLOT/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Stephen J. Pyne, more than an expert on fire–if you have heard the term Pyrocene, thank him–gives a primer here worth your time if you want the scary stuff in perspective. Wonky in a powerfully good way, still accessible and clear:
Our Burning Planet: Why We Must Learn to Live with Fire
By suppressing all wildfires and incessantly burning fossil fuels, humans have upset the role that fire has historically played in providing ecological balance. We need to rethink our view of fire and accept its presence by changing how we manage lands and plan our communities.
There is a paradox at the core of Earth’s unraveling firescapes.
The fires are seemingly everywhere, and everywhere more feral. They are burning from the Arctic to the Amazon, from New South Wales to the West Coast. They are visible, and their smoke projects their presence in the form of immense palls well removed from the flames. But equally significant are the fires that aren’t happening.
The Earth is a fire planet, the only one we know. It has held fires as long as plants have lived on land. Removing fire from landscapes that have co-evolved or co-existed with it can be as ruinous as putting fire into landscapes that have no history of it. The fires we don’t see — the fires that should be there and aren’t — are an index of ecological loss, like imposing a drought on a normally lush landscape.
We have too many bad fires — fires that kill people, burn towns, and trash valued landscapes. We have too few good ones — fires that enhance ecological integrity and hold fires within their historic ranges. At the same time, with the incessant burning of fossil fuels, we have too much combustion on the planet overall.
How did fire’s presence on Earth become so deranged? Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Sword-billed Hummingbird
Guango Lodge, Ecuador
Omniscience In The Garden
Sunflowers are the embodiment of familiarity and cheerfulness. But there is something slightly oppressive about that huge omniscient eye. Illustration by Dan Salmieri
Thanks to Charlotte Mendelson for perspective on the biggest flower we know, the flower that seems to know all:
On Sunflowers, with Love and Hate
I remember vividly the first time I saw a sunflower. It was during a family holiday in my childhood, in the middle of a hangry evening walk to a crêperie in the dullest part of rural France. We rounded a corner, and there it was, blazing against a bright blue sky, with uncountable numbers of siblings: big, comforting golden petals, head like a dinner plate, all modestly looking down: the Princess Diana of oil-producing agronomy. Who could not be charmed by such a look of shy self-protection? I, too, hated the sun, had too many sisters (one). The sunflower seemed almost human, just like me. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Long-tailed Manakin
male – Alajuela, Costa Rica
When The Going Gets Tough, Pick Farm-Fresh Edibles
The strawberry patch at Godfrey’s Farm in Sudlersville, Md. Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Thanks to Tove Danovich, whose work we are happy to see again after too long a stretch:
U-Pick Is a Popular Pandemic Pick-Me-Up
Strawberry fields, apple orchards and pumpkin patches have seen high volumes of visitors, most of whom have been on their best behavior.
U-pick farms — the choose-your-own-fruit-and-vegetable patches that draw droves each summer and fall — have been especially busy this year. Some farms have been so picked over that they’ve had to close their fields for a day or longer to let new fruit ripen.
With apple-and-pumpkin season in full swing, that popularity is continuing, and u-picks have adapted accordingly. Weekend festivals are out. Mask wearing is in. Most locations have introduced ticketed and timed entry, and created prepaid packages for produce and other amenities, like hay rides, to limit face-to-face interaction. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Common Tody-Flycatcher
Costa Rica
Transport To Manipur
A buyer makes her way through the open market’s labyrinthine lanes.
Thanks to Trishna Mohanty for another transporting article in this well-conceived series:
THE WORLD THROUGH A LENS
A Portrait of a Market in India Run Solely by Women
Nupi Keithel, or Women’s Market, a 16th-century bazaar in which all of the vendors are women, is a fountainhead of social and political activism in the Indian state of Manipur.
The perimeter of each shop is marked by the seller’s wares and belongings.
Barely five feet tall and hunched over, Anjana Devi, who is in her 80s, bellows instructions at two men as they unload crates of fruits from a mini truck. All around her, hundreds of women — most of whom are over 60 — mirror her actions. Farm-fresh produce surrounds them. The air is full of heady aromas: incense and fermented fish, jasmine buds and pungent spices. Continue reading
