Audubon articles from July 2004

Audubon archives from July 2004

Editor's note.(Editorial)
July 1, 2004... Full disclosure: Sandy Pinto, Audubon's indefatigable licensing director, who brought you those adorable plush bird toys, promised she would give me a few bags of our new brand of coffee if I plugged it in the magazine. She knows I'm an easy...

Audubon view.
July 1, 2004... Birds are an excellent barometer of the health of our air, land, and water. In 1962 Rachel Carson published her landmark book, Silent Spring, warning that we were poisoning our air, land, and water with DDT and other toxins. Her evidence rested...

The pride of Michigan.(letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2004... Les Line's article on the Kirtland's warbler ["Clarion Call," May] is outstanding! In one concise essay he has assembled the biological and social history of America's rarest warbler. His comprehensive and well-told story is the best I've...

Raking muck.(letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2004... TED WILLIAMS'S BRILLIANT ARTICLE [Sludge Slinging," Incite, May] points out what is right about the actions of some Americans, notably Jack Spadaro. The central Appalachian Mountains are being flattened, undermined, dewatered, and dumped on at...

True believers.(letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2004... CREATIONISTS' EFFORTS TO FORCE-feed a biblical argument destroyed centuries ago to a gullible public is not surprising, although it certainly reaches a new low at Grand Canyon National Park ["Separating Church and Park," Field Notes, May]. The...

Center of attention.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2004... THANK YOU FOR WRITING ABOUT The Audubon Center at Debs Park ["High Hopes"] in your March issue. TreePeople is one of Audubon's "sister" environmental organizations in Los Angeles. Some of the first trees we planted 26 years ago were in this...

Call to action.(letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2004... JEFF FAIR'S "CRY OF THE LOON" [March] eloquently tells the story of the yellow-billed loon, which is now the subject of a formal petition requesting that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service list the species as threatened or endangered under the...

All pumped up.(letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2004... I HAVE JUST READ TED WILLIAMS'S article "The Mad Gas Rush" [Incite, March], and I do not remember the last time I have been so very incensed! I had read previously about drilling and mining in Montana and Wyoming, but this act of extraction and...

Sonoran storm.(national parks)
July 1, 2004... BY DAY ORGAN PIPE CACTUS NATIONAL Monument in southwestern Arizona is an awe-inspiring delight to the average park visitor, especially in spring and summer, when seasonal rains turn the desert floor lush with leafy shrubs and bright yellow and...

Inside job.(Dispatches ...)
July 1, 2004... The northwestern crow, which lives on the Pacific coast from Alaska to Oregon, is a thief, stealing food found by others of its kind. But researchers have discovered that the crow alters its behavior depending on whether or not the bird it's...

Snowbirds.(Dispatches ...)
July 1, 2004... Like American seniors who flock to Florida each winter, aging birds in the United Kingdom could be benefiting from a milder climate. A recent report by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) showed that bird banders have been capturing an...

Sonic boom.(Dispatches ...)
July 1, 2004... In 1997 excited colleagues phoned Ted Cranford, a biology professor at San Diego State University, to tell him they had frozen the head of a dead sperm whale that had washed ashore in central California. The biologist drove that night to the...

Waterlogged.(Innovation)
July 1, 2004... FOR THE PAST CENTURY AND A half, hydroelectric power has been a boon to the modern world. At the same time more than 45,000 major dams worldwide have buried large swaths of forests, many of them old growth, under water. Now eco-entrepreneur...

Quick-tongued.(Dispatches ...)
July 1, 2004... Ever watch a chameleon catch a fly? It can launch its sticky tongue more than one and a half times the length of its body, snatch an insect, and return it to its mouth in less than a quarter of a second. The acceleration in this trajectory has...

A must-read.(Q&A)(Daniel Cooper)(Interview)
July 1, 2004... DANIEL COOPER, DIRECTOR OF BIRD conservation for Audubon California, is the author of a new 286 page book, Important Bird Areas of California. Three years in the making and drawing on hundreds of hours of contributions from dozens of advisers,...

A case for bad breath.(Dispatches)
July 1, 2004... Garlic repels not only vampires and members of the opposite sex but apparently birds, too. In preliminary findings published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, researchers found that the more garlic they added to the bowls of...

Distortion.(science)(protesting US science policy)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2004... THE CURRENT ADMINISTRATION may not be the first to politicize science, but it is the first to receive a bad scientific report card signed by more than 60 prominent scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates. The scientists--in a formal...

Record gas prices all wet.(Science)
July 1, 2004... When it comes to popular consumer liquids, gasoline is among the cheapest, especially in the United States. Even if the price of gas doubled in this country, Americans would still pay less than drivers in Europe; for instance, gasoline costs...

Invisible ink.(Dispatches ...)
July 1, 2004... Desktop paper recycling has hit offices in Japan, thanks to a carbon-free ink and a portable eraser machine developed by Toshiba. The "e-blue" ink, which can be used in printers and ink pens, disappears when subjected to the...

Power stink.(Dispatches ...)
July 1, 2004... Garbage pits may become gold mines with the help of the Plasma Converter, a futuristic contraption that turns ordinary trash and hazardous waste into valuable, clean fuels like hydrogen. A stream of energy three times hotter than the surface of...

Luck be a lady's slipper.(chapter spotlight)
July 1, 2004... HICKORY HOLLOW'S ESCAPE FROM bulldozers offers an upbeat tale of a community on Virginia's Northern Neck acting in harmony to save its rural way of life. Among the beneficiaries are the rare Kentucky yellow lady's slipper and countless...

Dry-cleaning ducks.(Dispatches ...)
July 1, 2004... In the past, birds caught in oil spills like the Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska were cleaned with liquid detergent, a time-consuming process that is stressful for the birds. Now it's possible to spray oil-covered birds with a fine (nontoxic)...

Jewels of the deep.(marine life)
July 1, 2004... IN THE SUMMER OF 2002, BIOLOGIST Jon Heifetz lay on his belly in the observation port of a cramped two-man Delta submarine, drifting 1,000 feet down through the Aleutian Islands' cold, inky waters. Once the Delta reached the bottom and the...

The cauldron of life: for the plants and animals that thrive where ocean meets land, the world is a rough-and-tumble place.(true nature)
July 1, 2004... Early one summer morning, while balanced on a knife's edge of basalt high above the churning surf at land's end, I was momentarily seized by an urge to leap. Gulls, suspended all around me in effortless flight, seemed to mock my hesitation....

Tropical travel.(Cover Story)
July 1, 2004... Conservation manifests itself in many forms. It can be a screened veranda with a jungle view, a coffee farm flush with wild orchids, or a small section of canal bank over which 1.6 million raptors fly each year. In this issue, Audubon explores...

The route to prosperity: the Panama Canal presents an unusual symbiosis between economy and environment, because it can't function without the water forests provide. The supreme irony is that one of humankind's most earth-altering engineering works is flanked by one of earth's most biologically diverse ecosystems, which now harbors a mind-boggling array of native species.(Destinatin: Panama)
July 1, 2004... AT THE HEIGHT OF THE DRY SEASON, the Rio Chagres is more trickle than torrent, clear in its shallows and green in its pools. Winds rush down the valley, the roar building and crashing like ocean surf; brown leaves flutter from the canopy above....

Top cat: the Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary in Belize is the world's first jaguar reserve--and a stronghold for the species. But although these elusive predators prowl its rainforests regularly, it's the rare visitor who actually glimpses one.(Destination: Belize)
July 1, 2004... IT'S A MORNING OF CERULEAN SKY, the first in days, and hiking boot traffic is already heavy around the little white-clapboard headquarters of the Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary, in southeastern Belize. A young Mayan man with a sardonic...

Made in the shade.(Destination: Mexico)
July 1, 2004... Every day Americans drink 300 million cups of coffee. Few of them realize their morning ritual could be contributing to the demise of the birds in their own backyards. By making a point of buying only coffee grown under a canopy of trees, they...

Divining nature: exploring the spiritual side of environmentalism.(Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest By Thomas R. Dunlap University of Washington Press, 206 pages, $24.95 THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN A deeply spiritual side to Americas love affair with nature. Henry David Thoreau sought...

Smart Alliance: How a Global Corporation and Environmental Activists Transformed a Tarnished Brand.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Smart Alliance: How a Global Corporation and Environmental Activists Transformed a Tarnished Brand By J. Gary Taylor and Patricia J. Scharlin Yale University Press, 278 pages, $30 Once the arch-nemesis of environmental and human rights...

Water Culture.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Water Culture By SKeGROUP and Ocean Futures Society Phaidon Press, 216 pages, $49.95 "The biggest problem is that we use the ocean as a garbage can," notes environmentalist and film producer Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of famed...

An Air That Kills: How the Asbestos Poisoning of Libby, Montana, Uncovered a National Scandal.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... An Air That Kills: How the Asbestos Poisoning of Libby, Montana, Uncovered a National Scandal By Andrew Schneider and David McCumber GR Putnam's Sons, 440 pages, $25.95 Investigative journalists often dig in dangerous dirt. For Andrew...

Art of the wild.(Night Visions: The Secret Designs of Moths)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... If moths no longer have to take a backseat to butterflies, credit should go to Joseph Scheer, codirector of the Institute for Electronic Art at Alfred University in Alfred, New York. Scheer produced Night Visions: The Secret Designs of Moths...

One picture.
July 1, 2004... TEXAS-BASED PHOTOGRAPHER DAN WINTERS IS BEST KNOWN FOE HIS DISTINCTIVE portraits of Hollywood celebrities--he recently won a World Press Photo award for a picture of Leonardo DiCaprio. One of Winters's favorite shots, however, is this image of...