photo credit: Stephen Crafts
Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge, Sanibel Island, Florida
Bird of the Day: Reddish Heron
A Day in the Blue Mountains
Last week we shared the compilation of A Day in the Cockpit. Here’s the second installment of our expedition video, with about nine minutes of the Blue and John Crow Mountains:
Much of this footage was taken within the national park, or Continue reading
Bird of the Day: White-collared Kingfisher
photo credit: Pallavi Kaiwar
Bhitarkanika National Park, Orissa
Tricksters, Animals, And Narratives We Are Meant To Learn From
“Reynard” is a defining document of a vast tradition in Western art: the trickster story. ART & PICTURE COLLECTION, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
Thanks to Joan Acocella for illumination of a narrative form we are quite fond of:
…Animal narratives have allowed writers with lessons on their mind to make art rather than just lessons.
Such tales are no doubt as old as animal paintings on cave walls. The earliest evidence we have of them is the beast fable, a form that is said to have come down to us by way of Aesop, a Greek storyteller who was born a slave in the sixth century B.C. Actually, no solid evidence exists that there ever was an Aesop, any more than there was a Homer. As with the Iliad and the Odyssey, we are talking about manuscripts that date from a period much later than the supposed author’s, and were probably assembled from a number of different fragments. In any case, a beast fable is a very short story (the Penguin Classics edition of Aesop renders “The Tortoise and the Hare,” perhaps the most famous of the fables, in five sentences) in which, typically, a couple of animals with the gift of speech learn a lesson from their dealings with one another. This moral is then stated at the end of the fable, and it is usually of a cautionary variety: don’t eat too much, don’t brag, watch out for this or that. As early as the third century B.C., these stories were being gathered together in various editions, usually for children, to teach them Latin (most were in Latin until the late Middle Ages) and some basic rules about life. Continue reading
National Governments, Entrepreneurial Conservation, And Increased Awareness Of Nature’s Value
A view from the north rim of Grand Canyon National Park via Flickr/NPS
This is our favorite kind of report:
NATIONAL PARK VISITORS INJECT BILLIONS INTO THE US ECONOMY
In 2014, more than the National Park Service hosted more than 292 million visitors. The system, which covers more than 84 million acres divided among 401 sites, includes some of the United States’ most iconic tourist destinations: the Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Everglades. And when people visit those sites, they spend money. For the past 25 years, the National Park Service has been measuring and reporting the economic effects of park tourism. (The first data collection effort on visitor attendance itself was conducted in 1904, when six national parks reported 120,690 visitors.)
The latest report, covering the year 2014, has just been released by NPS and US Geological Survey researchers, along with a companion website that includes a variety of data visualizations. Continue reading
Desalination Technological Innovation, Well Timed, Much Needed
Drought solution? A invention from MIT and Jain Irrigation Systems can turn salt water into clean drinking water using solar energy. Photo credit: Shutterstock
Thanks to EcoWatch for this good news:
MIT’s Solar-Powered Desalination Machine Could Help Drought-Stricken Communities
Lorraine Chow
Bird of the Day: Indian Peacock in flight
Jim Corbett National Park, Uttarakhand
A Day in the Cockpit
Out of the several hours of video that we took during our first month of the Jamaican Golden Swallow Expedition, Justin has condensed the cream of the crop into a fifteen-minute compilation that flows from sunrise to moonlight, with lots of birds, scenery, and other life in between.
Watching the video above, you can Continue reading
Eden Redefined
Thanks once again to the Atlantic for helping us put big picture ideas and concepts into human sized perspective.
Bird of the Day: Red-Rumped Swallow
Marikanive State Forest, Karnataka
Twain’s View Of India
We appreciate the sentiment from Mark Twain’s 1897 lesser known but ever interesting Following the Equator and feel obliged to show some India quotes that we can relate to, or at least smile at, as a recommendation for your reading pleasure while joining Raxa Collective in India sometime this year:
…So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or Nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his round…
…This is indeed India! the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, Continue reading
Tending Our Fields
We have a strong reaction of affinity with the theme of this op-ed essay in the New York Times from an author, an avid birder, we think highly of:
Matthew The Horse
Anyone over the age of 40 who went to school in Britain will know what a nature table is. Almost anyone younger than that will not because the nature table — the classroom altar or grotto made of child-gathered natural treasure — is no more. From the age of 7 to 11, I was a major contributor to the one in my suburban junior school. I mostly brought old nests like various leafy crowns, but also a squirrel’s drey, a wren’s foot and a goldfinch’s wing. My classmates came with furry catkins in jam jars, Continue reading
The Hope in Calamity
This five-month-old boy, rescued 22 hours after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit Nepal on April 25, is an entire nation’s miracle. SOURCE: kathmandutoday.com
It is not every afternoon that you hear a mention of the Richter scale and your country’s name in the same breath. Unfamiliar it being, you do what seems natural – seek answers. So a call goes to the friend in the capital (New Delhi), who appears to not have felt the tremors that were otherwise shaking headlines. As two people who spent half of each day in the newsroom and well understood the adage of bad news being good news (talk about occupational hazards), we got to the heart of the matter: tremors in India result of a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in the bordering country of Nepal. For comparison, take the 2010 Haiti earthquake recorded at 7.0; both countries share similar economic conditions and the latter continues on the path to recovery, with international aid. We knew the counters had started ticking, headlines were already screaming numbers.
Status of the Critically Endangered Jamaican Golden Swallow (summary)
Justin Proctor, Department of Natural Resources, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
Seth E. Inman, Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY
John M. Zeiger, Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY
Gary R. Graves, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Hispaniolan Golden Swallows in Parque Valle Nuevo, Dominican Republic. (From left to right) Adult in flight; adult perched overtop of artificial nest-box; 25-day-old chicks in nest-box, one day prior to fledging.
The Golden Swallow (Tachycineta euchrysea) is an aerial insectivore and obligate secondary cavity-nester known exclusively to the Caribbean islands of Jamaica and Hispaniola. The Hispaniolan subspecies (T. e. sclateri) was first described in 1866 by the American ornithologist, Charles Barney Cory, and though considered common in the early 1900s, it has become an increasingly rare resident of the highlands of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The subspecies is currently categorized as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Researchers have been studying the life history and breeding biology of the Hispaniolan subspecies since 2012, and initial conservation efforts are currently underway. The nominate Jamaican Golden Swallow race (T. e. euchrysea) was first described in 1847 by the English naturalist, Philip Henry Gosse, and was always considered uncommon, locally distributed, and endemic to Jamaica. Sadly, the Jamaican Golden Swallow subspecies has not been unequivocally observed since the late 1980s. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Osprey
photo credit: Stephen Crafts
Sanibel Island, Florida
Defining A Word We All Use Constantly, And Are Concerned About
Illustration by Javier Jaén
Thanks to one of the great writers on food-related ethical issues for getting us to think about a core definition for our everyday vocabulary, including taken-for-granted words like this one:
Why ‘Natural’ Doesn’t Mean Anything Anymore
By
It isn’t every day that the definition of a common English word that is ubiquitous in common parlance is challenged in federal court, but that is precisely what has happened with the word “natural.” During the past few years, some 200 class-action suits have been filed against food manufacturers, charging them with misuse of the adjective in marketing such edible oxymorons as “natural” Cheetos Puffs, “all-natural” Sun Chips, “all-natural” Naked Juice, “100 percent all-natural” Tyson chicken nuggets and so forth. The plaintiffs argue that many of these products contain ingredients — high-fructose corn syrup, artificial flavors and colorings, chemical preservatives and genetically modified organisms — that the typical consumer wouldn’t think of as “natural.” Continue reading
Green Oscar For Improving Elephant-Human Relations
Elephants have to negotiate a vast expanse of tea estates to reach distant rainforest fragments in the Western Ghats of India. Photograph: Ganesh Raghunathan/Whitley award
Whatever can be done, should be done, to improve the safety of humans living in the area where elephants consider home, by reducing the likelihood of encounters. This will in turn ensure the safety of elephants as well as the humans. Thanks to the Guardian for this news:
Dr Ananda Kumar wins one of seven ‘Green Oscars’ for his system of reducing human-elephant conflict by tracking and texting elephants’ locations to people
Karl Mathiesen
On the Valparai plateau in southern India people live in fear of unexpected encounters with giants in the dark.
As dusk settles, tea and coffee pickers collect rations from the townships run by the corporations that own the plantations and drift back towards their colonies. Buses drop workers on the roads and they make the precarious walk through the dark to their homes.
“They are scared. If I am there I am really scared,” said conservationist Dr Ananda Kumar, who created an SMS warning system to help workers live safely among elephants. On Wednesday at a ceremony in London, his work won a £35,000 Whitley Award, dubbed a ‘Green Oscar’. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Smooth-billed Ani
Cockpit Country, Jamaica
Global Big Day
Word bird map artwork by Team Redhead member Luke Seitz, a Bartels Science Illustration Intern at the Cornell Lab.
Team Sapsucker, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s competitive birding team, has participated in the World Series of Birding for quite some time. We’ve even had a couple of the Lab’s student participants, Team Redhead, as contributors to the blog. Over the last several years, Team Sapsucker has been breaking or coming very close to the US record for a Big Day — the most bird species seen or heard in 24 hours — but this year, ten days from now in fact, the team will be in Panama instead of staying in the southwestern US! Here’s what Chris Wood, captain of Team Sapsucker and eBird’s project leader, has to say:
The time of year has come when migratory birds cross continents and even hemispheres to return home to their nesting grounds. Because long-distance migrants face many hazards during their journeys, Team Sapsucker, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s top birding team, has chosen to spend 24 hours of non-stop birding in Panama, a region critical to the travels of migratory birds in the Western Hemisphere.
Planet Of The Apes, If We Act
An endangered Sumatran orangutan in the forest of Bukit Lawang, in Indonesia’s Sumatra island, one of the key sites identified as at risk. Photograph: Romeo Gacad/AFP/Getty Images
© WWF
The photograph above illustrates a story in today’s Guardian in the Environment section, and addresses the readership of that publication in a manner that expects action. We had provided the executive summary of the study here that is the maritime version of a major call to action, and that was still quite a read; here, thanks to the Guardian, is a briefer read on the topic of a terrestrial call to action by WWF, one we hope that apes of all varieties can appreciate:
Hundreds of millions of acres of forest could be lost in the next two decades in less than a dozen global hotspots for deforestation, conservationists have warned.
Research by wildlife charity WWF has identified 11 “deforestation fronts” where 80% of projected global forest losses by 2030 could occur.
Up to 170m hectares (420m acres) could be lost between 2010 and 2030 in these areas if current trends continued – equivalent to the disappearance of a forest stretching across Germany, France, Spain and Portugal.
The areas are the Amazon, the Atlantic Forest and Gran Chaco, and the Cerrado in South America, the Choco-Darien in Central America, the Congo Basin, East Africa, eastern Australia, the Greater Mekong in South East Asia, Borneo, New Guinea and Sumatra. Continue reading
Organikos 