The one-year anniversary of the BP oil spill is this week, and chances are you’ve seen plenty of reminders on TV and online. Many news outlets are again playing the images of tarballs, beach cleanup, and containment boom that made last summer seem so endless and awful—and they’re beginning to tell the story of economic [...]
How hard can it be to lose a flamingo? Well, the above species, James’s Flamingo, went missing for fully half the twentieth century, before an expedition rediscovered them in the volcanic lakes of Bolivia’s Altiplano, 14,000 feet above sea level. These days, two Cornell graduate students, Marita Davison and Jennifer Moslemi, focus their research on [...]
This week we were encouraged to see that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has begun posting counts of bird species that have been recovered in the Gulf of Mexico during the oil spill. The first such report lists 4,676 individuals representing some 85 species, plus another 19 categories for incompletely identified birds. The new [...]
Our multimedia production team returned from their 7-week trip to the Gulf Coast on July 20. Coincidentally, that was just a few days after BP’s latest cap managed to stop the leaking oil (a permanent end is expected in August, when relief wells are completed). It’s been a relief to finally glimpse the end of [...]
A Tree Swallow is not exactly the face of the Gulf oil spill at present—and we hope it never will be. But many backyard-nesting birds, including swallows, do migrate through the Gulf Coast twice a year. We’re encouraging people to participate in our NestWatch project as one way to keep an eye on their populations. [...]
For the last three days a weird, underwatery gray light has bathed the Delta. Tides high from the full moon have pushed past marina docks and pooled under boat trailers in the parking lots. Cattails and palm trees bend in the same direction all day long, under steady east-southeast breezes. Old-timers call this hurricane weather. [...]
On Friday we visited the magnificent seabird colonies of Breton Island, home to some 100,000 terns, pelicans, and gulls. After witnessing some heavily oiled mangrove islands the day before (more on this in a later post), it was a relief to see such a vibrant spectacle with little sign of oil. Breton National Wildlife Refuge [...]
I spent Thursday looking for Wilson’s Plovers under the baking sun on a barrier island east of Grand Isle. I was with a survey team led by Richard DeMay, of the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program, and Steve Cardiff, of Louisiana State University. I’m grateful to them for the chance to see first-hand the unique threats [...]
While we were out at Iron Banks (after rescuing a frigatebird), we ran across a colony of a couple of hundred Caspian Terns on a skinny, boomerang-shaped island. Though we had seen no oil in this part of the Delta, just watching the birds coming and going brought home how susceptible they could be. These [...]
