Audubon articles from May 1998

Audubon archives from May 1998

A new message: stop, look, listen.(Editorial)
May 1, 1998... It's a thrill and a privilege to be the new editor of Audubon, This is a magazine I've admired for years, and it's one of the few that, with your help, can make a real difference in the world we live in. I come to Audubon for the same...

Tracking birds on the net.(Brief Article)(Editorial)
May 1, 1998... The spring migration is upon us, and I am reminded of how little we really know about the population trends of most of the birds that visit our gardens, grasslands, feeders, and forests. We've gotten fairly good at counting species that are...

The rush to save a thrush.(Bicknell thrush population declining)(includes related article on threats to other species)
May 1, 1998... In New England the Puritans established what amounted to informal zoning laws: They farmed and built in the lowlands and left the mountaintops alone to glorify God. But today the peaks are anything but serene. Power windmills are sprouting up....

Piracy on the cold seas.(the demand for Patagonian toothfish better known as Chilean sea bass is sending fishermen to the icy Southern Ocean to catch the slow-growing species)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1998... With fish stocks over-exploited nearly everywhere, fishermen are heading to the Southern Ocean, the world's most dangerous sea, which girdles Antarctica. There they battle enormous waves, furious gales, and bitter cold to set out longlines for...

To lure a hummingbird.(includes a regional guide to plants that will attract these birds)
May 1, 1998... By planting the right flowers. you can easily attract hummingbirds to your backyard. I planted a patch of scarlet bee balm outside the glass patio door of our home on the Maine coast for my first hummer garden, then went about the hustle of...

Tearing at the earth: Flash foods arrive in desert canyons with the suddenness of lightning, and with the power to move boulders and sculpt stone.
May 1, 1998... Flash floods arrive in desert canyons with the suddenness of lightning, and with the power to move boulders and sculpt stone. Eleven-sixteen in the morning, Tuckup Canyon, Arizona. The sky is the purple of a bruised plum. Ten minutes ago...

Swimming with sharks.(The Last Hunt for Wild Fish)(Cover Story)
May 1, 1998... Two decades ago, Jaws gave voice to a worldwide fascination with sharks. But today the fish's population is in decline. Has our fascination gone too far? Alone, suspended 100 feet below the surface in the Pacific blue. I watched the shark...

Song for the swordfish.(The Last Hunt for Wild Fish)(includes the National Audubon Society's guide to seafood)(Cover Story)
May 1, 1998... Recently, more than 300 of the country's top chefs took swordfish off their menus. Here's why you may never see another one of these magnificent fish, dead or alive. At 4:00 each morning, New York City's Fulton Fish Market bustles and bangs...

David Sibley's magnificent obsession.(a painters guide of bird species)
May 1, 1998... He dropped out of college, lived out of his car, and traveled the continent with one goal: to paint birds. Now 36, David Sibley has almost finished his lifework. When I first met David Sibley, on the hawk-watch platform at Cape May Point,...

Old growth for sale.(logging of Northwestern forests)(includes related map of sites where ancient forests were sold for logging in 1997)
May 1, 1998... Five years ago, environmentalists pinned their hopes of saving old-growth forests on the Northwest Forest Plan. Today they're in an uproar because thousands of trees, some as old as 400 years, continue to be logged. KEMP-HYATT, a pilot for...

Midnight at the oasis.(includes related article on the Sonny Bono Memorial Salton Sea Reclamation Act)
May 1, 1998... TIME IS RUNNING OUT FOR CALIFORNIA'S SALTON SEA. WILL CONGRESS BE ABLE TO STOP THE CLOCK? If you glory in the spectacle of birds--millions of them, from herons and egrets to terns and avocets and stilts to inland rarities such as...

Arachnid love.
May 1, 1998... One face-to-face encounter with a fearsome eight-legged creature was all it took to become smitten by spiders. I peer through my zoom microscope at a mottled reddish-brown blur immersed in alcohol. As I twist the focusing and magnification...

Eureka! An Antpitta!(bird discoveries in Ecuador)
May 1, 1998... From deep in the cloudforests of Ecuador comes one of the most exciting new bird discoveries of the decade. In true science, conventional wisdom says, there are no Eurekas! Discovery is arduous and labor-intensive, a systematic slow dance....

Trespassing: An Inquiry into the Private Ownership of Land.
May 1, 1998... Trespassing: An Inquiry into the Private Ownership of Land By John Hanson Mitchell. Addison-Wesley, 320 pages, $26. Sooner or later, it occurs to many landowners to wonder about the history of their plot of land, to ask, "How am I situated?"...

Eco-vandalism.(restoring damaged natural sites)
May 1, 1998... A year ago, on Memorial Day weekend, someone destroyed the Eye of the Needle, a natural stone arch that overlooks the Missouri River just east of Fort Benton, Montana. The arch, 11 feet high and about 15 feet wide, was a geologic curiosity...