This week in birds - #242

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment:

Snowy Owl photo by Kevin Knutsen of The Owl Pages

Snowy Owls are irrupting into the lower 48 states again this winter although apparently not in the numbers that we've had in recent years.

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February 2, Groundhog Day, was also World Wetlands Day, a time to acknowledge how wetlands help to protect us from extreme weather events and natural disasters.

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And "Ontario Nature" writes of the importance of vernal pools in the wetlands scheme of things and gives us four reasons why they should be protected.

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Surprisingly, not everyone agrees agrees that wetlands and streams should be protected. On Thursday, the Republican Senate voted 54 to 45 to reverse the Stream Protection Rule put in place by the Obama Administration in an effort to protect the nation's waterways from debris generated by surface coal mining. The House had already approved the reversal, so the change will now go to the president.

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Everything in Nature is connected. You can't remove or change one element without affecting the things that are linked to it. Thus, when invasive exotic plants overrun an area, they do so to the detriment of the native species that depended on the native plants that they replaced. Removing the invasives and replanting native plants gives a boost to pollinators, birds, and other species that depend upon them.   

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Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah introduced a bill that would allow the government to sell off 3.3 million acres - land totaling the size of Connecticut - of public lands. He claimed the land had "no purpose for taxpayers." It turned out those taxpayers did not agree; in fact, Americans quite like their public lands and want them protected. After a big public outcry, the bill was quietly withdrawn. But do not be deceived; the enemies of public lands are determined that their friends and corporate backers should be able to profit from them. They'll be back with a new bill.

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The National Park Service has been underfunded for years and unable to keep up with the infrastructure repairs that need to be made, more evidence of the work of the enemies of public lands. The Pew Charitable Trusts are calling upon the new Congress and Administration to reverse that trend and to "Fix our national parks."     

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"All About Wildlife" lists some of the species that have been saved from extinction as a direct result of the enforcement of the Endangered Species Act.

The Brown Pelican still flies over the Gulf of Mexico thanks to the ESA.

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There hasn't been a lot of good news coming out of the Philippines lately, so this bit is particularly welcome. After three years of negotiations with stakeholders including Indigenous People communities, government agencies, universities, non-government and private sector organizations, the Cleopatra's Needle Critical Habitat has been established. The critical habitat covers more than 100,000 acres and aims to protect several threatened species. 

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Another animal brought back from the brink of extinction by the Endangered Species Act is the California Condor. Things are going well enough for the big bird that conservationists are now considering a plan for expanding its range by re-introducing it to northern California and Oregon.

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Remember when I said a few paragraphs back that the enemies of public lands do not give up? Well, another bill has been introduced in Congress by Paul Gosar of Arizona that would encourage drilling for oil on national park lands. It's all a part of the ongoing campaign to weaken protections for the parks.

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A new study traces the way that bird beaks have evolved. The study found that there was an initial burst of evolution around the time that the big dinosaurs died out, but since then evolution has occurred more slowly, with the exception of some island locations, such as Hawaii and the Galapagos. I found this particularly interesting since I am currently reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection.

Just a few of the vast array of types of bird beaks that exist in the world.

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Another reason for preserving wetlands: They are a key to fighting climate change. A new report from the Boreal Songbird Initiative calls for enhanced protection of wetlands in the boreal forest which help to sequester carbon and remove it from the atmosphere.

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Public protests do have an effect. Italy has put on hold its plan to cull five percent of its wolf population after vigorous protests from environmentalists and animal lovers who had mobilized across the country.  

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Deforestation puts the regeneration of the cleared areas in jeopardy because the birds that lived there have to move on to other habitats, and forests are dependent upon birds to help spread their seeds and assist in the natural growth of the areas.

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Leaving the Paris Agreement on climate change would isolate the United States and make it a loner on the world's political stage, but it is unclear if our new government understands or cares about the implications of such isolation.

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The Amazon Reef, discovered just last year, is a 3700-square-mile system of corals, sponges, and rhodoliths located where the Amazon River meets the Atlantic Ocean. The oceanic conditions of the system are unique, not found in other places on Earth. The first ever underwater photographs of the area are now available.

Rather Be the Devil by Ian Rankin: A review

Throughout much of Ian Rankin's latest, I was very worried about my old friend, John Rebus. All those years of heavy drinking and smoking seem to finally be catching up with him, and he's suffering from a bad case of bronchitis and perhaps something even more ominous. 

Rebus is never one to stay down for long though. Even his creator discovered that several books back in this series when he tried to write Rebus off into the sunset in Exit Music. The man just won't go quietly and keep his nose out of things. He keeps creeping back. He's retired from the police at least twice now, but he can't seem to settle into the quiet life of an OAP (Old Age Pensioner). 

He still has his contacts in the Edinburgh police, particularly his long-time protege, DI Siobhan Clarke, who keeps him informed about what's happening. And whenever the police need a Cafferty whisperer, John's the one to call.

Yes, Rebus' nemesis and erstwhile drinking buddy Gerald Morris ("Big Ger") Cafferty, Edinburgh crime boss, is finding it just as hard as his buddy to "retire." He still maintains an interest in the city's crime scene, especially as it relates to his supposed successor, Darryl Christie. When Christie is attacked in his own driveway, the investigation inevitably turns to Cafferty and the call goes out for the Cafferty whisperer.

But even before that, Rebus has been keeping himself involved by looking into cold cases. One, in particular, intrigues him. It's the case of a wealthy socialite who was found dead in a luxurious Edinburgh hotel room back in the '70s. One reason he's intrigued is because of the case's connection to a local celebrity musician and his band. It seems that the socialite may have been having an affair with a member of the band. Anything to do with the music of the '70s is bound to grab the attention of Rebus, the music connoisseur.

Suddenly, with the new case related to Christie/Cafferty, Rebus has two parallel investigations to pursue, but at some point those parallels begin to converge. Is there really a connection between that long ago murder and today's Edinburgh crime scene? If there is one, you know John Rebus will find it.

It's such a pleasure to walk the streets of Edinburgh and settle down in the old Oxford Pub with Rebus, Clarke, and - oh, yes - Malcolm Fox, too. The three of them work together brilliantly as a team, the OAP and the two DIs. The plot hardly even matters; it's the interaction of those characters that keeps us turning the pages.

That's not to say that the plot is not well-constructed. It is just as tightly woven as all of Rankin's plots. It's really rather amazing that he has managed to keep up the quality of this series through, now, twenty-one entries. Generally, in such long-running series there is an inevitable fall-off of quality somewhere along the way, but in this, as in many other things, Rebus/Rankin is exceptional. Long may he continue.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars     

Will he or won't he?

He won't. At least not where I live. It is a gray and overcast day and any groundhog poking his head out this morning would not have been startled by his shadow.

It's all academic anyway because it seems like spring has already begun here, with daily temperatures in the 70s and 80s and new growth popping up everywhere. Of course, the possibility of another frost still exists for the next few weeks, but it really feels like spring has sprung.

Carolina jessamine, ready to burst into bloom any day now. 

February flowers: Daffodils and amaryllises

In the winter garden, the first daffodils are rearing their pretty heads.

And, inside, the amaryllises continue to grace our days.

Spring is in the air, which is 80 degrees F and sunny as I write this, and my plants that were frostbitten by our early January freeze are slowly coming back. Welcome, February!

The Sellout by Paul Beatty: A review

A book about racism, segregation, slavery that is laugh-out-loud funny? Yep, that would be The Sellout in a nutshell!

It's easy to see why this book won all those awards last year, including the first Man Booker for a work by an American author. It is a tour-de-force of writing, a biting social satire that makes its point not with a bludgeon but with a delicate literary sensibility firmly based in historical authenticity.

Beatty has given us a protagonist/narrator who is a young black man from the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens, a neighborhood on the outskirts of southern Los Angeles. He was raised by a single father, a sociologist who used his son as the subject of his weird, often outlandish psychological studies of the roots of fear and of racism. 

The son grew up to become a farmer who raised delicious fruit of many kinds, the most delicious of all being satsuma oranges. He also grew watermelons and weed, one of the finest varieties of which he called "Anglophobia."

He lost his father along the way to a policeman's gun. The man was shot essentially for driving while black, a sad and familiar story in our country. At least, the resulting financial settlement with the city of Los Angeles made life a bit easier for the son.

Over time, our narrator watches the decline of his neighborhood, until, finally, Dickens no longer even appears on California maps, at which point our hero decides on a social and psychological experiment of his own, one that will put Dickens back on the map. With the help of the town's most famous resident, the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins, he comes up with an outrageous plan; he will reinstitute slavery and segregation in Dickens. That should get California's - and the world's - attention!

Thus it is that Hominy becomes his willing - even eager - slave and he begins a stealth campaign to reinstitute segregation in the local school. His plan is a roaring success! Soon the students at the all black - well, black and Hispanic and Asian - school are doing better than ever, succeeding as never before.

Sure enough, this does bring him and Dickens attention and he winds up before the Supreme Court in a very funny scene, which I can't even begin to describe.

Along the way, the author pricks the hot air balloons of just about every black American cultural icon and cliche that one could think of - from Mike Tyson to Bill Cosby to George Washington Carver to Tiger Woods to Clarence Thomas and so many more. They are all here. Also lawn jockeys, cotton picking, Saturday morning cartoons, as well as the American liberal agenda all come in for a skewering. The comic writing sometimes made me wince or shrug wryly, but mostly it just made me grin. 

This is a zany book that employs racist terms in the service of humor - words that are never spoken in polite society. It's a way to shock the reader and get his/her full attention. Suffice to say if you are one who is offended by the language in Huckleberry Finn, you'll be absolutely appalled by the language in The Sellout.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Poetry Sunday: Mending Wall

Walls are much in the news these days, which, of course, brought to mind one of my favorite Robert Frost poems.

Two neighbors meet in spring to repair the winter damage to the wall between their properties. Frost makes the argument to his neighbor that they really don't need a wall. After all, neither has any cows: 

     "...Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
     What I was walling in or walling out,
     And to whom I was like to give offence.
     Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
     That wants it down."

But his neighbor stubbornly clings to what he was once told by his father, with no better reason for wanting a wall:

     He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
     Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
     He will not go behind his father's saying,
     And he likes having thought of it so well
     He says again, " Good fences make good neighbours."

Let us not move in darkness but examine in the light of day why we think we need to build walls.


Mending Wall

by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall, 
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it
where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, " Good fences make good neighbours."

This week in birds - #241

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment:

Sandhill Crane photographed at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge.

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Several years ago there was a flurry of excitement over the reported sighting in an Arkansas swamp of a bird that had been thought to be extinct. However, no definitive photographic evidence of the sighting was ever presented and eventually the excitement and the talk about the possibility that Ivory-billed Woodpeckers still lived subsided, and the bird was once again consigned to the rolls of the extinct. Some researchers remain true believers in the bird's existence, however, and recently a new paper has been presented outlining evidence that the bird may still survive in Florida. Audubon online sums it up for us. 

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Among the flood of executive orders signed by the president this week was one reviving the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, both of which pose significant threats to the environment as well as the Dakota Access being a threat to burial grounds sacred to the Lakota Sioux nation. 

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention abruptly canceled its long-planned climate and health summit as the new climate change-denying administration was taking office, but now the summit is back on, to be held at the Carter Center in Atlanta. It is being sponsored by non-governmental entities such as Harvard Global Health Institute, the Turner Foundation, and the Climate Reality Project which was founded by Al Gore.

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Using autonomous recording devices that can be placed in a location and left for weeks or months to record sounds, the Boreal Songbird Initiative, working with First Nation scientists in Canada, is hoping to get better information on some of the birds that inhabit the most remote parts of the Boreal region. 

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Mary Tyler Moore, who died this week was a hero and a glass ceiling breaker for many women, but birders may best remember her for the time she stood up for a Red-tailed Hawk. When the co-op board in charge of the luxury Fifth Avenue apartment building where she lived had the famous Pale Male's nest removed from the building, Moore and other residents were incensed. They mounted a successful protest that convinced the co-op board to make a nesting site available for Pale Male and his mate and to leave them in peace. 

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At the end of the last Ice Age, Australia was populated by a large number of massive mammals, but they have all disappeared. Their extinction has been thought to have been caused by humans, but a new study postulates that it was primarily caused by a changing climate, to which the animals were unable to adjust. That mass extinction could help to predict what the present-day human-caused climate change might  bring. 

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Last Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency staffers were ordered by the new administration to freeze all of the agency's grants and contracts, cutting off financial support for many state and tribal environmental protection programs. The gutting of this agency's functions would undo many of the protections that people like Rachel Carson fought for. 

Incidentally, the PBS program "American Experience" has a terrific documentary on Rachel Carson that is running this week. Look for it. If you've missed it on your local channel, you may be able to watch it online. Trust me - it is worth the effort.  

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Laysan Albatrosses stubbornly return to the same site each year to nest. But what if that site is right next to a U.S. Navy runway in Hawaii? The Navy, along with the help of biologists, is taking fertilized eggs from the nests of the birds and moving them to foster parents that nest in a safer location. The chicks should then imprint on that new location and return there when they are adults ready to nest. 

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Canadian scientists went through a period when their government was hostile toward science and tried to shut them up, during the Steven Harper administration. They are now reaching out to their colleagues in the United States to explain how they fought back and to try to help them protect data so that it cannot be expunged by anti-science apparatchiks.

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Volunteers are working to protect areas of the New Jersey shore to allow plants to grow and birds to breed without human interference. They are accomplishing this by cordoning off sections of the shore area. 

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New evidence appears to indicate that Earth is warming even faster than was previously thought, meaning that we have even less time to try to reverse or slow the trend which would ultimately make the planet uninhabitable for humans.

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More scientists are getting actively involved with politics and are considering running for office to try to combat the anti-science, anti-intellectual bias of the government.

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The proposed wall between Mexico and the United States is a human rights issue but it is also a threat to a number of migratory species. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, it would be detrimental to 111 endangered species and 108 migratory birds.

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For more than 40 years, the Endangered Species Act has been the cornerstone of the nation's environmental laws and a lifeline to prevent the extinction of rare and endangered species. But now the Act itself may be facing extinction, put to death by a hostile Congress and executive branch.

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A wet winter has provided some relief to drought-stricken California, but unless the state can begin to manage it water resources in a more sustainable way, that advantage will not be sufficient.