Monthly Archive
"It is pleasant to have been to a place by the way a river went," Henry David Thoreau wrote. Just my sentiments, as I surveyed the Buffalo National Scenic River on a trip to northern Arkansas in early May. The river suggets a kind of serpentine vitality, and on this day its taut surface resembled the smoothness of mercury as it coiled into a bend in the near distance. I was eager to launch our rented canoe and be swept along to our takeout point five miles below.
Paid internships are hard to come by. Luckily, as an intern at Audubon, I am paid for my toils. To pay the rent for my closet of a room in Queens, I took up a second job as a cashier at a little kitchen shop in Greenwich Village.
A wedgetail shearwater fledgling prepares for its first flight. [Photo: Hob Osterlund]
I was walking along a north Kauai coastline the other day when I paused to peer into a wedgetail shearwater’s burrow, prompting a friend to admonish: “Look, we woke it up. It was sleeping.”
The Red List of Threatened Species, published by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), is one VIP roster you don't want to be on. This year, however, more than a thousand bird species have unfortunately made the cut, given a boost by climate change.
At 6:30 this morning, I found an injured Northern Parula on my neighbor’s driveway. He (it was a “he”) must have collided with the kitchen window. When I picked him up, he was still alive, struggling to get his bearings. While Holly and I marveled at holding such a beautiful thing in our hands and scratched our heads over what to do to help, he died in my hand. I know that tens of thousands of songbirds die during migration each year. The arithmetic of population dynamics accounts for such losses. Because this bird died in my hand, his death feels personal.
A research vessel recently rechristened for noted environmentalist Russell W. Peterson, the 91-year-old former National Audubon Society president, chairman of the President's Council on Environmental Quality and governor of Delaware, broke up 14 miles off Rehoboth Beach in a severe storm that smashed the Mid-Atlantic states on Monday, May 12th. The liftboat, formerly used to service oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, was being used to study migratory bird routes for a company planning an offshore wind farm. One of the two crewmen rescued by a Coast Guard helicopter died.
That lovely tune from the Great American Songbook has been stuck on repeat in my head since I found the dooryard carpeted with wild violets the other morning. I hear several different versions, by Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Hartman, tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, the Dave Brubeck Quartet. Matt Dennis wrote the music, Tom Adair the lyrics. Of course they wouldn't be Politically Correct today, when wearing fur risks a paint attack, but to a romanticist they are poetry:
It was the weekend we have waited for all year. The one when all the Warblers show up in one place all at the same time. Holly and I spent most of Saturday and Sunday in Clove Lakes Park on Staten Island. We found all the birds we were hoping to find, plus a few we haven’t seen recently. Cape May Warbler. Canada Warbler. Wilson’s Warbler. Seventeen Warblers in all.
The melting of the Arctic ice pack due to global warming, scientists say, may cause a hybrid of the polar bear and grizzly bear to become fairly common as their habitats increasingly overlap. Arctic biologist George Divoky has dubbed the brownish-white bruin the "grolar bear.' "Grizzlies are moving north while at the same time the polar bears are forced to be on the beach, Divoky said, "and we've found a number of grizzly-polar bear hybrids." DNA tests on one animal shot in the Northwest Territories confirmed that it was fathered by a male grizzly and a female polar bear.
The big old apple tree that leans precariously near our front door is full of pink-tinged blossoms. Come August, the lawn will be littered with little green apples (remember that Sixties hit song by Roger Miller?) to the delight of white-tailed deer that wade across the creek from our woods. We'll wake up one morning and a doe or two and their fawns will be gobbling up the worm-pocked spheres.
