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 [...]
For anyone who feels spring has been taking its time this year, here’s a post from graduate student Taza Schaming, who as of late March was still skiing through four feet of snow to study Clark’s Nutcrackers in Wyoming: “Today I drove up to the site near Triangle X Ranch. It was lightly snowing, but [...]
About 400 people piled into the Visitor Center at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology on Saturday. Maybe half of them were kids—tots in strollers, gangly 6-year-olds, a boy scout troop—and they had come to see a conservationist not much older than themselves: Olivia Bouler. Olivia’s pledge to help during last year’s BP oil spill caught [...]
We’re still reeling from the news of the huge earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on Friday and whose aftereffects continue to threaten Japan’s people. As if the human catastrophe weren’t enough, the tsunami that crossed the Pacific Ocean has swept over most of Midway Atoll, where it has washed away tens of thousands of [...]
One of the birds I didn’t get to see during my travels in Belize was the endangered Yellow-headed Parrot. Today Katie Blake describes a close encounter with two of these delightful birds—orphans from an encounter with poachers. Katie was in Belize last summer as a research assistant studying Mangrove Swallows on the Golondrinas de las [...]
There’s been an immense amount of concern and confusion about what caused thousands of Red-winged Blackbirds in Arkansas to drop dead in the middle of the night on New Year’s Eve. The general public and media outlets have been calling us with questions, but it’s been very hard for anyone—even the biologists working on the [...]
Great news for the Short-tailed Albatross, a bird once so endangered by feather hunting that its population plummeted from an estimated million individuals to 10 pairs nesting on a single island in Japan in the 1950s. Since then, the long-lived species has slowly improved its numbers to about 3,000 birds. Today, the American Bird Conservancy [...]
What does the future of conservation look like? According to Wesley Hochachka, it looks fast and young. We last heard from Wes on the island of Helgoland, and before that in Brazil, but this week he’s at a conference at the American Museum of Natural History. Here’s Wes with his impressions: Sure, I know that [...]
