Maasai Mara National Reserve
Bird of the Day: Southern Ground Hornbill
Maasai Mara National Reserve
Climate Leadership Lacking In Too Many Places
Once a golf course, now a solar farm supplying tens of thousands of homes in Japan
If you know a bit about Japan’s love of golf, the photo above says alot about leadership there in moving away from fossil fuels in the direction of alternative energy. But it is too little too late compared to what is happening elsewhere. Thanks as always to Bill McKibben for his newsletter:
Energy from Heaven
and not from Hell/Exxon.
Amid the torrent of hideous news last week, one item might have skipped your notice: Exxon announced the acquisition—its biggest since picking up Mobil a quarter century ago—of one of the largest fracking operators in the world. As the AP reported, “including debt, Exxon is committing about $64.5 billion to the acquisition, leaving no doubt of the Texas energy company’s commitment to fossil fuels.” In fact, it’s the declaration of conviction that they think they have enough political juice to keep us hooked on oil and gas for a few more decades, even in the face of the highest temperatures in 125,000 years. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Giant Kingfisher
Legon Botanical Gardens, Accra, Ghana
Going The Extra Mile For Monarch Butterflies
Ms. Elman collects butterfly eggs from milkweed plants growing wild along New York City’s highways. Karine Aigner
Some of the best stories are about people who go the extra mile for others:
To Save Monarch Butterflies, They Had to Silence the Lawn Mowers
An unlikely group of New Yorkers is winning small victories in the battle to protect butterfly habitats.
The small white dot under a milkweed plant is a monarch butterfly egg. Karine Aigner
The Long Island Expressway is not generally a place people linger, unless they’re stuck in traffic.
But during the summer, Robyn Elman can often be found walking alone near the highway’s shoulder, inspecting scraggly patches of overgrown milkweed. The plant is the only source of nutrition for monarch caterpillars before they transform into butterflies. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Black Woodpecker
Seewinkel National Park, Austria
Fossil Fuel-free Ammonia
A fossil fuel-free ammonia plant at the Kenya Nut Company, near Nairobi. TALUS RENEWABLES
Alternative fertilizer has been something of an environmental holy grail, and this technology looks to be large step in the right direction. Have a look at the two companies mentioned in this Yale e360 news short:
Farm in Kenya First to Produce Fossil-Free Fertilizer On Site
The Kenya Nut Company, near Nairobi, will be the first farm in the world to produce fertilizer, on site, that’s free of fossil fuels.
A small fertilizer plant, built by U.S. startup Talus Renewables, will use solar power to strip hydrogen from water. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Yellow-fronted Canary
Maasai Mara National Reserve
Climate Change As Understood By Helen Czerski’s Macro Physics
Helen Czerski on a 2018 ocean research expedition to the North Pole. MARIO HOPPMANN
We non-scientists have learned much from the scientists who study climate change, and surprises keep coming, this one from physicist Helen Czerski:
The Pacific Ocean, as seen from space. NASA
The Planet’s Big Blue Machine: Why the Ocean Engine Matters
The ocean is an enormous engine, turning heat energy into motion, says physicist Helen Czerski. But human activity is threatening that machine — depriving the seas of oxygen, increasing stratification, and potentially changing the currents that influence global weather.
Photographs of Earth taken by astronauts in space more than half a century ago revealed a blue planet dominated by oceans and billowing with clouds. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Lesser Honeyguide
Nairobi National Park, Kenya
Water Rights, Heritage & Responsibility
The Los Angeles Aqueduct. | Photo by Brian Melley/AP
California water has been covered in earlier posts, and it keeps getting more important. Once again, with abundance comes responsibility:
Dear Los Angeles: You’re Drinking Indigenous Water
How LA can localize its water supply and finally do right by the Owens Valley Paiute tribes
In August 2023, a tropical storm bore down upon Southern California for the first time in 84 years. As Hilary’s northward-rolling blanket of rain touched off mudslides from Hollywood to the San Bernardino Mountains, thigh-deep water floated vehicles in the streets of Cathedral City. To the east, 120 miles of Highway 395 were closed due to flooding and rock slides, pinching off the route between the city of Los Angeles and the once-green valley 300 miles away from which it has, for over a century, sourced fresh water. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Red-eyed Vireo
The Nature Conservancy’s Love Creek Preserve, Bandera County, TX
Really, Cargill?
Beka will hand-deliver a letter to the Cargill-MacMillian dynasty in Minneapolis on Thursday, calling on the billionaire owners of America’s biggest private company to stop destroying the Amazon rainforest and its people. Photograph: Thalia Juarez/The Guardian
Cargill has appeared a few times in our pages over the years, not always showing poor stewardship. But today, we have to ask whether they really are trying as diligently as possible to do the right thing. We applaud Beka and her community for this letter, and hope the recipients respond with the sense of responsibility that comes with their wealth:
A Cargill transshipment port for soy and corn projects on the Tapajos River in Itaituba, Para state, Brazil, in 2019. Photograph: Léo Corrêa/AP
Beka Saw Munduruku , 21, traveled 4,000 miles to deliver letter and confront family behind Cargill empire over what she says amounts to a litany of broken promises
A 21-year-old Indigenous activist from a remote Amazonian village will hand deliver a letter to the Cargill-MacMillan dynasty in Minneapolis on Thursday, calling on the billionaire owners of the US’s biggest private company to stop destroying the Amazon rainforest and its people. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: African Gray Hornbill
Legon Botanical Gardens, Accra, Ghana
With Exceptional Wealth Comes Exceptional Responsibility
Chuck Feeney’s stealthy giving earned him a nickname: “the James Bond of Philanthropy.” Atlantic Philanthropies
May the exceptionally wealthy take note of the example set by Chuck Feeney. Only once have we used the word billionaire in these pages, but a couple of times we pointed to this remarkable man who gave away all his billions while alive, and now that story is complete:
Chuck Feeney’s Legacy Is a Lesson for America’s Billionaires
Yes, the man avoided taxes, but he gave away his fortune, seeking nothing in return.
The selfless billionaire is a rare creature indeed. Chuck Feeney, who died on Monday at the age of 92, was one of them. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Little Bee-eater
Maasai Mara National Reserve
Life, Our Understanding, and Nothing
The desert isn’t usually known for its unrivaled ability to support life, and for good reason. Deserts are, if not quite hostile, harsh environments, and the very air can suck the life essence – valuable water, out of unprepared visitors. Fortunately, the natives have had all the time in the world to thicken their skin, grow water bladders in their feet, shrink their stomata, or whatever appropriate organ addition/subtraction/modification may describe their gradual adaptation to a dangerously dry environment. In the above photograph, a spider (from a long line of spiders that no doubt were faced with the very same decisions and dangers as it was) has industriously coated all the available branch space of a small shrub. How, or why, I don’t know. What matters is that one organism – the spider in question, was drawn to this particular shrub, of all the similar shrubs in the valley. Was it drawn to the beauty of the tree? Did the spider somehow know there would be a hearty meal within? Was it merely the first vertical object to come within view? Do electrical impulses travel through the nervous system of the species to which this particular spider belongs at a certain time of day telling it to simply lay web until the nearest object is covered?
How can we find out? How will we know if what we find out is true? Why do we care?
These are big questions.
Bird of the Day: Northern Bobwhite
Hays County, TX,
Where Your Seafood Comes From, And How
Ian Urbina has chronicled this topic in the past, and the fishing crimes on the high seas have not abated, to say the least:
China has invested heavily in an armada of far-flung fishing vessels, in part to extend its global influence. This maritime expansion has come at grave human cost.
DANIEL ARITONANG GRADUATED from high school in May, 2018, hoping to find a job. Short and lithe, he lived in the coastal village of Batu Lungun, Indonesia, where his father owned an auto shop. Aritonang spent his free time rebuilding engines in the shop, occasionally sneaking away to drag-race his blue Yamaha motorcycle on the village’s back roads. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Magpie Shrike
Maasai Mara National Reserve
Stories from the Field: Spoon-billed Sandpiper
In my previous post I’d written about birding with Clement Francis and how educational he was in so many ways – sparking my interest in birding, my abilities as a bird photographer, and not least, my understanding of the challenges that birds and other wildlife suffer in the face of climate change and human related habit destruction. The story of the Spoon-billed Sandpiper impacted me in a huge way.
This tiny bird travels between the Arctic Tundra and the South Asiatic regions. While they breed in the tundra, they migrate southwards during winters in a migratory route of 8000 kilometres. Just 200 pairs of this birds existed back then. Now due to human intervention and the implementation of captive breeding programmes, the population are reaching to a decent number.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has listed the Spoon-billed Sandpiper under the “critically endangered” species. During one of our trips Clement showed me the picture of the bird in its breeding plumage that was shot in Siberia. From that moment on my mind was set on seeing the bird. It may appear like an exaggeration, but the bird appeared in my dreams quite often and the desire to see it for myself grew stronger every day. At the time of our trip the bird was in migration to a small patch in the Sunderbans of Bangladesh, but the numbers there were decreasing, and their path seemed to be shifting toward stopovers in Thailand instead.
Organikos 