By "The Tern" Jessica Leber--California’s recent and continuing wildfires have already devoured more than 600,000 acres, threatened some 10,000 residences and forced evacuations of large swaths of some counties. But the burning has also ensnared one of the rarest birds in the world. 

    The first time I saw Psycho, I thought, hey, this Norman Bates looks like a nice guy. But after that famous scene where Tippi Hedron face-plants onto the bathroom floor and Bates carries her off in the shower curtain, I realized you never really know what goes on at a hotel behind closed doors.

By "Tern" Alexa Schirtzinger--"The best thing the piping plover has going for it is its extreme cuteness," wrote Janet Egan on her blog, "Plover Warden Diaries," this June.

The "Tern" Jessica Leber--Did you know that parrots and passerines are closely related to falcons? Don’t sweat it if you didn’t—neither did the world’s ornithologists, until this week. Now, a new genetics study published in the journal Science has shaken several bird groups off their perches on the avian tree of life. 

By "Tern" Alexa Schirtzinger--At first, I was mad. Last week, Exxon Mobil—the same company that raked in a record $40.6 billion in profits last year—had been excused of $2 billion in damages it still owed for the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Ah, the family road trip: getting car-sick trying to entertain myself with a book, smashed up against the window because the younger brother is taking up a little more than his fair share of space and Mom has been in charge of the radio for the last hour, transfixed on old Hall and Oates and Jimmy Buffet albums. The air conditioner doesn’t work on one side and the batteries in the Walkman are dead. Are we there yet?
   

By "Tern" Jessica Leber--China is determined to show the world its greenest side during this summer's Olympics, and for good reason--no one wants athletes and tourists to choke their way through Beijing’s blanket of smog. What remains to be seen is whether the Games’ environmental ethos has spurred lasting improvements in one of the world’s most polluted cities or whether, instead, its pollution problems will be swept under the rug. 

By "Tern" Alexa Schirtzinger--Rescue divers recovering bodies from a passenger ferry that sank Monday in a typhoon off the Philippines have been suspended from their work because of the discovery of endosulfan, a neurotoxic pesticide, that had been on board, bound for Del Monte's pineapple plantations, the BBC reported.

By "Tern" Alexa Schirtzinger: Today, for the first time ever, New Yorkers can feel the spray of a waterfall without so much as leaving the city.

Imagine motoring from Hawaii to California through the North Pacific subtropical gyre, an immense region of the ocean where high pressure rules, trade winds fail, and currents trace a circle many hundreds of miles across, corralling anything that floats into a slowly rotating vortex. A few days off Hawaii, you notice something odd about the sea around you: it is laden with a subsurface "soup" of plastic trash, from soccer balls and kayaks to water bottles, snarls of polypropylene rope, and bladder-like shopping bags.