A blue-footed booby, mid-dance. Photo: Pete, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s quite the show: First, he lifts the left, oh so earnestly. Then, he lifts the right, serious as can be. He sways like so, slowly, and after awhile might invert his wings toward the sky, in a pose both graceful and awkward, while giving a plaintive whistle.

This, you might know, is the dance of the male blue-footed booby, a fish-eating seabird found in the Galapagos, Peru, and Mexico. Of course, it's performed to impress a female, which will join the dance if it's seductive enough. The bluer those feet, the better—and the younger, it turns out.

The South Farallon Islands. Photo: NOAA

An inspiring, but perhaps controversial proposal has surfaced off the coast of Northern California: A plan by the Fish and Wildlife Service, and other conservation organizations, to eradicate non-native mice on the South Farallon Islands, which will help a small, spritely, nocturnal seabird—the ashy storm-petrel.

Photo: NOAA

“An acre of red mangroves can annually shed more than three tons of leaves,” writes Christopher R. Cox in the current issue of Audubon. “That deadfall—the foundation of a complex food web—is quickly set upon by microorganisms like bacteria and fungi.” It’s those leaves that make salt-tolerant mangrove forests a nursery for inconceivable numbers of invertebrates, fish, birds, and more. But this detritus creates more than dense biodiversity, and boot-stealing mud; it contributes to mangrove forest’s astonishing ability to sequester carbon, an important consideration in an increasingly CO2-filled world.

The fruit of vertical farming? Ilustration: Holley Flagg

Last month, the American Museum of Natural History held its 21st Annual Spring Environmental Lecture, attended by folks hungry first for a discussion of sustainable food in cities, and then a locavore luncheon (which alas, this reporter didn’t partake in). There are many challenges when it comes to urban eating, the panel made clear. But "the exciting thing about food is that it involves everyone,” said Nevin Cohen, a professor of Environmental Studies at The New School, “and there isn’t a one size fits all solution.”

Read on and, if you haven’t already, be sure to browse the March-April issue of Audubon devoted to the cycle of food. Senior editor Susan Cosier’s article "Urban Planting" is especially apt.

Photo: USCG/Patrick Kelley

Virtually wiped out by plume hunters a century ago, reddish egrets are slowly returning. About 12,000 live on the Gulf Coast in the U.S., a number small enough to be vulnerable. Oil spills in the Gulf pose a real threat to reddish egrets especially, because, unlike other heron species, they’re found only along coastal waters.

Snowy plover chicks. Photo: USFWS

What could be a greater contrast to last year’s massive, devastating oil spill than a snowy plover, no bigger than a fist, skittering hither and thither along a Gulf Coast beach. It’s a bird that weighs just two ounces as an adult, while an estimated 170 million gallons of crude gushed from the Deep Horizon well.

Photo: ImipolexG, Creative Commons License

Several weeks ago, there came a flash of breaking news on that silent monitor which, in this day and age, has replaced cheesy music in elevators: Del Monte to individually wrap bananas. Wait a sec, anyone who glimpsed this headline quickly thought: Isn’t a banana already delivered in a bag, one called “a peel”?

But that was just the beginning of a bunch of recent banana news...

A satellite image of the 22-mile-long Teshekpuk Lake (lower left) and other tundra lakes below the Beaufort Sea (at top). Photo: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team, via Wikimedia Commons

“Santa Claus is real!” That’s what Steve Zack, a Wildlife Conservation Society biologist, declared in 2009, when the Obama Administration announced it would “hold back” the south margin of Alaska's Teshekpuk Lake from a 1.8 million acre oilfield lease sale. "Hold back" sounds like a mixed message, doesn't it? But it was at least a temporary victory for Zack, who has been studying birds in the region for years. It spared 170,000 acres of crucial wetland habitat.

Now, Zack's the co-author of a study published this month in the journal Arctic that found summer nest density in this area, south of Teshekpuk, is higher than at six other places with similar data on the Alaskan Arctic Coastal Plain (such as the Prudhoe Bay oilfield), including for birds like Lapland longspurs, long-billed dowitchers, and pectoral sandpipers.

Photo: Terry Foote, via Wikipedia Commons

Many a youthful birder type, whatever his or her intensity, has grandparents in Florida to thank for that interest—that’s my case, at least. This weekend, I was on the beach again in Naples, Florida, which I’ve visited since I was a boy. It was a breezy, overcast afternoon at Clam Pass on the Gulf. Gangly brown pelicans were im-plodding in the surf, and terns were terning overhead, sharply. Then a flock of maybe 50 or 60 black skimmers drifted down the stiff beach air on their long pointed wings, dark on top, white below. They would be so noble, so dapper, if not for their red-ringed, elephantine bills, which, to anthropomorphize some more, are at the crux of awkward and wondrous. The skimmers settled on a spit, or sandbar, that had slowly emerged as the tide withdrew. Why? No hyper-tanned joggers or maniacal shell-gleaners would bother them. None right of mind.

Photo: David Hancock

One afternoon last week, David Hancock, a biologist, author, and publisher, pulled off the highway to talk to me on his cell phone while making his bald eagle rounds in the Fraser Valley, outside of Vancouver, B.C. He’s been studying birds of prey there, near his home, for 50 years, and this day was no exception, except it’s not so easy to get from A to B, to check your nests, when you’re being bombarded with eagle questions from across the country (and I wasn’t the only one). But Hancock jumped into this year’s story with such enthusiasm you’d never know he’d told it before. This is precisely what I’ve come to expect of those who have made a life of birds of prey.