Audubon articles from January 1998

Audubon archives from January 1998

El Nino's other costs. (the unusual sea surface warming will bring repercussions along the food chain for ocean and shore animals and plants)(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... Marlins from the tropics surfacing in waters off Washington State. Butterflies usually found in New Mexico fluttering into Canada. Starving seals, displaced sea otters, and rafts of dead seabird chicks washing ashore. While much has been made...

Wetland roadblock. (the South Lawrence Trafficway has stopped five miles short of its end because of the Baker Wetlands, 45 acres of virgin wetland prairie, which stands in the way of the expensive Kansas highway project)(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... When the South Lawrence Trafficway (SLT) was first proposed, in 1985, many commuters from Lawrence to Kansas City, an hour east, were already calculating the minutes they would save. The highway through Lawrence, home to the University of...

A bend in the river: in the gap carved out by Pennsylvania's Little Juniata River, one can see traces of time and of travelers past.
January 1, 1998... For me, it is a place of passage. Hiking into the water gap carved through Tussey Mountain by the Little Juniata River, I enter a hidden world of vegetation subtle and soaring; a refuge for reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals; a portal...

Habitat-conservation plans: compromise or capitulation?
January 1, 1998... Standing in the parched and rolling scrublands just east of San Diego, I felt a long way from the front line of the biodiversity wars. No rainforest, this; the most exotic-looking thing in these brown, unassuming hills was a healthy supply of...

Reality check: the debate behind the lens: our ability to separate photographic fact from fiction is a thing of the past. So what hope remains for faithful, vital images of wildlife? Plenty.
January 1, 1998... A bald eagle was silhouetted against a sky saturated with yellow and orange light. Michael W. Robbins, then editor of Audubon, had been looking for an arresting photograph for the cover of the July-August 1994 issue, and this shot seemed to...

The long wait. (polar bears must wait for the arctic summer to end so that their food supply, seals, are abundant in the area again)(Brief Article)(Illustration)
January 1, 1998... It's the biggest carnivore on land, larger even than the omnivorous grizzly bear. A dominant male may weigh 1,600 pounds and stand more than eight feet tall on his hind legs. Born to the water, Ursus maritimus has been found hundreds of miles...

Alls quiet on the Rocky Mountain front: by her bold decision to block gas drilling, Forest Supervisor Gloria Flora may have ensured that a critical Montana ecosystem remains forever wild.
January 1, 1998... By Fen Montaigne After two days of heavy overcast the clouds parted, revealing one of the West's most dramatic landscapes. Gloria Flora stepped out of a car on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains and took in the view. The high,...

Wild and wonderful Alaska.(Advertisement)
January 1, 1998... Alaska is probably at or near the top of most wish lists compiled by travelers serious about discovering the greatest natural wonders on the North American continent. The state's growing popularity is testimony that travelers possess the...

Thomas Moran.
January 1, 1998... Thomas Moran was a visual apologist for the 19th-century American West. His paintings, now gathered in an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. (through January 11, followed by dates in Tulsa and Seattle), helped...

Into the Sound Country: A Carolinian's Coastal Plain.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... The Sound Country," Bland Simpson writes, "starts at the base of a scuppernong vine in the Great Dismal Swamp, runs south for two hundred amazing miles, taking n much of eastern America's greatest and broadest inland waters, and ends in a...

Song for the Blue Ocean: Encounters Along the World's Coasts and Beneath the Seas.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... Many people, Carl Safina writes, "still view the ocean as the blank space between continents." And as history reminds us, imputing blankness to any region -- oceanic or continental -- is the first step toward destroying it. The purpose of Song...

Taking Wing: Archaeopteryx and the Evolution of Bird Flight.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... There has been a spate of books recently on the link between dinosaurs and birds, partly because our culture seems momentarily fixated on dinosaurs but also because the link between dinosaurs and birds is a matter of real controversy. For more...

In the Dust of Kilimanjaro.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... David Western has spent a lifetime in Africa, as a child in colonial Tanganyika (now part of Tanzania), as a researcher in what became Kenya's Amboseli National Park, and most recently, as director of the Kenya Wildlife Service. His studies of...

Cultures of Habitat: On Nature, Culture, and Story.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... In his appealing new collection of essays, Gary Paul Nabhan argues that biodiversity prospers only where cultural diversity also thrives. This idea can be expressed, he says, in negative terms: "wherever empires have spread to suppress other...

Landmark gift on the Chesapeake.(Inside Audubon)
January 1, 1998... Wells Point Farm, with 948 acres of grasslands, forests, and marshes on the Chesapeake Bay, was the magnificent legacy passed on to Jean D. Shehan by her father, the banker and sportsman William DuPont Jr. Fascinated by animals and the...

Panama: Paradise Found?
January 1, 1998... At noon on the last day of this century, the United States will hand over to Panama the Panama Canal and 569 square miles of land along the 50-mile waterway, in accordance with the treaty signed by the two nations in 1977. While recent news...