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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
NOTE: More news and resources are being compiled here UPDATE: We’ve once again increased the number of open-access accounts from 22 to 34 in response to requests from U.S. Fish and Wildlife workers in the Gulf. I’ve added the most recent 12 species to the bottom of the list below. Last week we opened access [...]
Effective today, the Cornell Lab has opened access to comprehensive life-history information on 15 bird species threatened by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Our intent is to help anyone who’s looking for information about birds in harm’s way; who needs specific answers to questions about life history, population or conservation status, migration schedules, feeding or [...]
NOTE: More news and resources are being compiled here UPDATE: Mississippi Audubon to host volunteer bird monitoring training Mon., June 7, at Moss Point The worst aspect of the oil spill for many of us is the sense of powerlessness it leaves. Donating is one way to help, at least a little (in particular, donations [...]
NOTE: More news and resources are being compiled here I took a deep breath of relief this morning when I read that the “top kill” procedure at BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil leak seemed to have worked. UPDATE: Sadly, on Saturday it became apparent that the top kill had not worked after all. Oil is continuing [...]
For Tim Gallagher, editor of Living Bird magazine, the Deepwater Horizon oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico brought back sad memories of a spill cleanup he became involved in 20 years ago, in Bolsa Chica, California. He had arrived on the scene as a writer and photographer to document cleanup efforts—but the oiled birds [...]
Two days ago, the folks at eBird put out a call-to-action to birders who live near the Gulf Coast and want to help with the oil spill response. Today eBird launched a Google gadget that anyone can use on their website, blog, or Google homepage to explore recent sightings of 10 vulnerable species along the [...]
