Male Townsend's warbler
National Parks Service

He might seem handsome and sweet, but don’t be mistaken—the Townsend’s warbler is a bully who clobbers a guy and steals his girlfriend. That’s what dogged detective work by University of Washington doctoral student Meade Krosby has revealed, solving the cold case of the disappearing hermit warbler.

Every year the United States loses roughly 1.2 million acres of agricultural land to development, says the American Farmland Trust. By my calculations, that works out to roughly 3,300 acres a day, or about 137 acres an hour, or nearly 2.3 acres a minute. Somehow to me the daily, hourly, and by-the-minute tolls sound the scariest, since 1.2 million can seem almost abstract. Still, no matter how you look at it, it’s pretty frightening stuff.

The day after the presidential election Audubon New York held a lunch in the Rainbow Room at the top of Rockefeller Center, in part, to honor George Pataki. I’m personally familiar with New York’s former governor and his record, having profiled him for Audubon seven years ago because he was so successful in protecting land. By the time he left office a year ago he conserved more than one million acres of open space.

Ever since I was little, I have loved arts and crafts projects. Growing up, I never let my mother throw anything away that could be reincarnated in the form of furniture for my dollhouse, a jewelry box, or a homemade gift. (Thankfully, Mom tolerated such hoarding behavior; indeed, she introduced me to art in the first place.) Little did I realize at the time, however, that my projects had two other merits besides entertainment--they were low-cost, and they supported an environmental ethic: reusing. You can imagine how delighted I was, then, when I came across the following two do-it-yourself crafts books intended for children. Not only do they encourage creativity, but they do so in a way that celebrates the natural world around us.

Photo courtesy National Park Service

With so much focus on the election and financial crisis, it’s easy to miss what the Bush administration has been up to in its last few months in power: namely, attempting to make a slew of last-minute changes to rules that affect the environment and wildlife.

Chicagoans silently streamed tears and New Yorkers thronged the streets as Barack Obama delivered his presidential acceptance speech last night but the fervor was also felt in Kogelo, a village in western Kenya and the ancestral homeland of President-elect Obama. I spent a summer near here, surveying avian diversity in maize fields and forest patches and gathering bird mythologies from elders. The Luo people—the tribe of Obama’s father and much of western Kenya—have mixed regard for birds, which can destroy crops, eliminate pests, bring magic or imply death. Here are some of the stories I collected:

The box elder trees along the wayside are now leafless, but certainly not barren. Their branches are heavy with hanging clusters of paired winged fruit, or keys, that will last through the coming winter and into spring. The seeds, one to each key, are an easy food source for squirrels, mice and birds like evening and pine grosbeaks. And that's probably the nicest thing you can say about an oddly and variously named native species that few people would consider a prized shade tree, though it was widely planted for that very purpose in times past.

The Tuareg are nomads of the southern Sahara. For centuries their camel caravans have transported salt and other essentials across the desert for 500 miles from Taoudenni to Timbuktu and other fabled cities. Most of the salt will be transferred onto “pinasses” (small open boats) for the voyage to the coastal town of Bamako.

Now that Halloween is past, it's a piece of cake to clear the decks of the ersatz bats, spiders, and other things that go bump in the night and plague the kiddies' dreams. But one terror remains on the scene all winter.