Audubon articles from March 2007

Audubon archives from March 2007

Editor's note.(forest conservation)(Editorial)
March 1, 2007... One perk of editing a magazine is sharing personal passions with readers. About 20 years ago I made my first trip to Opal Creek, one of the last islands of old-growth forest left in the continental United States and just two hours from...

Audubon view.(environmental protection)
March 1, 2007... This year's Christmas Bird Count included eastern bluebirds in Ontario and flocks of snow geese north of the St. Lawrence River. American woodcock were spotted in full display in Rhode Island. These unusual sightings in the middle of winter can...

Keeping score.(Letters from our readers)(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2007... I have a very low opinion of President George W. Bush, but let's exercise a tittle perspective in viewing the declining number of newly listed endangered species in recent years ["White House Watch," Field Notes, January-February]. First,...

Corky aftertaste.(Letters from our readers)(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2007... As a winery owner and member of the Audubon Society, I read with interest the article on the cork forests of Portugal ["Cork Screwed," January-February]. I felt it was well written and quite accurate in its statements. I did, however, disagree...

Beach bummed.(Letters from our readers)(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2007... My wife and I have been going to Cape Hatteras annually for a week for 20 years. It's like a second home to us. We even get the local newspaper so we can keep up on things like this current ORV "crisis." One group that Ted Williams did not...

Grousing.(Letters from our readers)(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2007... I was surprised by the absence of any reference in "Sagebrush Showdown" [January-February] to a real threat to the sage-grouse: wind power. Wind farms not only destroy habitat and kill birds and bats, they also include new road construction,...

Shrimp shortage.(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... EDITOR'S NOTE: Many of you had problems ordering the sustainable shrimp featured in "Pass the Cocktail Sauce, "[Audubon at Home, January-February]. We have since learned the company's supply is temporarily depleted, though you may still find...

Corrections.(Letters from our readers)(Correction notice)
March 1, 2007... A northern mockingbird was misidentified as a gray kingbird in "Beauty and the Bomb" [November-December 2006]. The World Wildlife Fund does not receive funding from the cork producers association, as reported in "Cork Screwed"...

Food fight.(food supply)(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... Frat parties and student-teacher ratios aren't all that's weighing on the minds of high school graduates shopping for universities these days. Some prospective collegians are factoring in the greenness of the cuisine at their potential alma...

Climate of fear.(science law)
March 1, 2007... It's not every day that thousands of scientists manage to agree on something, perhaps other than the earth being round or that what goes up must come down. But President George W. Bush has a knack for uniting his critics. More than 11,000...

Dolphin indigestion.(Bao Xishun)(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... It's not easy removing ingested bits of plastic from two star dolphins' stomachs. But if they are performers at Royal Jidi Ocean World in Fushun, in northeast China, you just call Bao Xishun, the world's tallest man. Veterinarians at the...

Unsung dung.(burrowing owl)(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... Little burrowing owls may attract dinner using unconventional bait: poop. When the owls line their tunnels with excrement from cows, horses, and other animals, dung beetles and other insects march to the scene, only to be devoured by the birds,...

Electronic field trip.(bird migration)
March 1, 2007... Bird migrations surely stirred wonder among humans long before the rise of civilization. As they pondered the mysteries surrounding the annual passage of millions of winged creatures, puzzling over their punctual arrivals and abrupt departures,...

Free fall.(bird conservation)
March 1, 2007... As birds go, the cerulean warbler is very hard to spot. At just four inches, it is small even for warblers, and it forages and nests high in the canopy. With its numbers plunging by nearly 80 percent during the past four decades, it's becoming...

Packing up the planet.(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... What are the citizens of an ailing planet to do? Sure, conservation and sound environmental stewardship are important. But shouldn't we have a backup plan? There are some who think so, and they're offering a few out-of-this-world solutions. "If...

CSI: stone age.(hominid)(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... About 2.5 million years after a hominid child was killed, scientists may have finally fingered the murderer: an ancestor of the African crowned eagle. In 1924, when anthropologists discovered the three-year-old hominid's damaged skull, the...

Survival song.(gibbons)(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... Among primates, gibbons are known for loud, elaborate songs, especially morning duets performed by breeding pairs. As with birds, it's thought that the songs are an evolutionary adaptation involved with mate selection, Now scientist s have...

Ecotopia.(Mark James and Ben Keene)(www.tribewanted.com)
March 1, 2007... Here's a concept: Locate a remote island, then ask 5,000 people to join a global Internet "tribe" that will build a real-life eco-community. Should there be palm-thatched huts? A beach bar? Organic farm? Scientific research? Scuba school?...

True blue frog.(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... Gangly wood storks nesting atop virgin bald cypress and alligators galore are star attractions along the two-mile-long boardwalk at Audubon's Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary near Naples, Florida. But recently, nationwide attention was focused on a...

A girl named George.(Housatonic Audubon Society's George Sargent Janes Leubuscher)(Biography)
March 1, 2007... In 1913, a year before the guns of August thundered and plunged Europe into World War I, a 10-year-old girl in Pittsburgh joined a Junior Audubon Club. A lot of little girls joined these clubs in those days, but this one was unique. Her name...

Green guru: advice for the eco-minded.
March 1, 2007... Is it safe to eat swordfish again? Ken Jones, Saratoga, NY Well, yes and no. Overfishing in the 1980s caused Atlantic swordfish populations to dip to dangerously low levels, but strict fishing regulations have helped the north Atlantic...

The maine event: even after 34 years of successful seabird restoration, determined predators are still making it tough for scientists to declare a conservation victory.(Interview)
March 1, 2007... From the deck of our tour boat, the island known as Eastern Egg Rock looks like a rocky weed patch crowned with a halo of swirling terns, whizzing puffins, and fast-flying eider ducks. When a show-off puffin flies close to the boat, whoops of...

Shooting Audubon: John James Audubon's life was the stuff of legend. Still, capturing the man who changed the way we view nature posed a daunting challenge for filmmaker Lawrence Hott.
March 1, 2007... We've come to find John James Audubon. I'm with filmmaker Larry Hott at Oakley Plantation, near the Mississippi River in Louisiana. Hott is shooting a biographical portrait--John James Audubon: Drawn From Nature, which will be broadcast soon on...

Nova Scotia vintages: pair well with every good time.
March 1, 2007... With Nova Scotia you expect poetic beauty and incomparable warmth and hospitality, but what you might not expect is that the Baco Noir will be both excellent and local. Here the unique topography and ubiquitous influence of the ocean are key...

Fanning the flames: amid the season of dry and heat, there are glimpses of life, of fire and rock and weed, that reveal the world's hidden nature.
March 1, 2007... What is fire? In a drought year such as this one, even on the eighth of July--five days since the last rain--the stupendous heat has returned, and today I catch the first scent of truly dry heat, oven-baked dryness: the odor of baking pine...

The dirt on mulch: don't kill a forest to grow a plant. Choose mulch alternatives that are more accessible, easier on the environment, and often as cost-effective as they can be (free).
March 1, 2007... A few years ago Jacqui Sulek was on a mission to find an environment-friendly mulch for her Fort Lauderdale, Florida, garden, something less destructive than the cypress mulch so popular at local nurseries and superstores. She had heard the...

A rare jewel: the Opal Creek wilderness, just two hours from Portland, is one of the Pacific Northwest's last uncut old-growth forests. In spring "phib freaks" trek between the tall, massive trees, on the lookout for amphibians that date back to the age of dinosaurs and forecast an ominous future.(Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center's Adam Mims)
March 1, 2007... Adam Mims is ankle-deep in a snowmelt stream, methodically turning over moss-covered rocks. Ignoring the teeth-chattering cold of the cascade, he slowly moves from stone to stone until he suddenly breaks his rhythm with the quick sweep of an...

Scarface: skimming above a devastated Appalachian landscape, a photographer zooms in on the damage wrought from mountaintop coal mining.
March 1, 2007... Photographer Cameron Davidson remembers Appalachia when it was right side up. "I'm used to the hills," he says. "To me these absolutely flat, level areas are so strange. They're almost otherworldly." In the thickly forested mountains of...

Happy meals: in a New York City suburb, a grand experiment in farming yields food that is grown locally on a small scale and free of toxins. The well-heeled diners flocking to the farm's gourmet restaurant and the carefree children attending its camps may well be getting a taste of the future.
March 1, 2007... Even from the driveway, I can tell that this is not going to be like any other culinary experience I've ever had. Glossy black Simmental beef cattle toss their heads as they graze in the pasture to the right of the road; dozens of egg-laying...

From effluence to affluence: a California town is filtering its sewage through marshes, thereby improving the wastewater's quality and restoring wildlife habitat. Now the idea is catching on.
March 1, 2007... A river otter rises out of the water, its body a silver arc, reflecting the glow of the setting sun. I slow from a jog to a walk and peer through the cattails, hoping for another glimpse. But the otter has vanished beneath the thick carpet of...

A birder for all seasonings: having caught the birding bug when he was young, Hank Kaestner chose a worldly career as a spice buyer, and built his sprawling life list when no one was looking.(Interview)(Biography)
March 1, 2007... The large world map on the basement wall of Benjamin H. "Hank" Kaestner III's suburban Baltimore home bristles with hundreds of color-coded pushpins, each representing a different overseas journey: red for business; blue for trips with his...

The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate in Crisis and the Fate of Humanity.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 1, 2007... By James Lovelock Basic Books, 177 pages $25 Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami that inundated parts of Southeast Asia in 2004 were devastating natural disasters, but they can't compare to the one that may soon arrive: global warming,...

Tapped out.("The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat")(Book review)
March 1, 2007... Fish are disappearing at such a clip that most species could be gone within a generation. An intrepid journalist scours the world to find out how it's happening right under our noses. The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the...

Unbowed: A Memoir.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 1, 2007... By Wangari Maathai Alfred A. Knopf, 352 pages, $24.95 In 1977, after years of watching her beloved country's natural resources plundered, Wangari Maathai created the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots consortium of mostly rural Kenyan...

Why Don't Woodpeckers Get Headaches? And Other Bird Questions You Know You Want to Ask.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 1, 2007... By Mike O'Connor Beacon Press, 224 pages, $9.95 Maybe this has happened to you: After buying a bag of mixed birdseed, you pour it into your new feeder, and... nothing. It sits there. The birds barely touch it. Why? Mike O'Connor has...

Art of the wild.("Gone Wild: An Endangered Animal AIphabet")(Brief article)(Book review)
March 1, 2007... In Gone Wild: An Endangered Animal AIphabet (Walker and Company, 40 pages, $16.95), David McLimans takes youngsters on an alphabet safari where the letters resemble endangered species. For example, the two peaks of an "H" transform into the...

Midnight Forests: A Story of Gifford Pinchot and Our National Forests.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 1, 2007... By Gary Hines/Illustrated by Robert Casilla Boyds Mills Press, 32 pages, $16.95 (Ages 9 and up) Some might choose to take the road less traveled, but Gifford Pinchot, America's first forester, blazed a trail. Caught between lumbermen...

Quest for the Tree Kangaroo: An Expedition to the Cloud Forest of New Guinea.(Brief article)(Book review)(Children's review)
March 1, 2007... By Sy Montgomery/Photographs by Nic Bishop Houghton Mifflin, 80 pages, $18 (Ages 10-14) The forests of Papua New Guinea look like a Tolkien fantasy: fungi of every color abound, orchids sprout like daisies, and unusual animals roam....

Birdsongs.(Brief article)(Book review)(Children's review)
March 1, 2007... By Betsy Franco/lllustrated by Steve Jenkins McElderry Books, 40 pages, $16.99 (Ages 3-7) All is quiet at sunrise as the sky changes from a glowing pink to a pale denim blue. Then it happens: 10 tat-tat-tats break the stillness as a...

Monkey business.(One Picture)(feature on macaque monkeys)(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... Meet Josh, who's featured on the cover of celebrity photographer Jill Greenberg's art book Monkey Portraits: Plus a Fee Apes (Bulfinch Press), a portfolio of 76 elaborately lighted and digitally enhanced studio shots of trained animals. Josh is...