Audubon articles from November 2006

Audubon archives from November 2006

Audubon view.(wind power)
November 1, 2006... For years environmentalists have been touting the benefits of generating electricity from pollution-free wind power. As the threats of global warming loom ever larger, alternative energy sources like wind power are essential. (For a more...

Windstorm.(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2006... In reading your article regarding wind energy ["Selling the Wind," September-October], it is apparent that Audubon has fallen victim to one of the tricks of the "right wing scheme machine." In this case that means stalling progressive change by...

Galloping horses.(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2006... I read with great alarm the recent Incite about the "feral horse" problem ["Horse Sense," September-October]. First, despite the author's family's and friends' experience, others have done well with their adopted mustangs. For example, my...

Wrong turn.(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2006... Birding by jetski [advertisement, page 45, September-October]: What a novel idea. Binoculars? Who needs 'em? Now you can see all the birds in the marsh in just a few minutes! Grab a few as you go by for leisurely identification back at the...

Corrections.(Correction notice)
November 1, 2006... The September-October Incite ("Horse Sense") places the Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Range in Colorado. It is actually located in Montana, south of Billings. A map of Peru in "Last Resort" [July-August] incorrectly placed the Tambopata River; it...

Dumb and dumber.(off road driving sometimes take to roadless areas)(Brief article)
November 1, 2006... Off-road driving erodes stream banks and hillsides, chews up vegetation, and forges roads in otherwise roadless areas. It also brings people to places they just shouldn't be--like, in one case, down a mine shaft. Last spring two men off-roading...

Star search.(searching for woodpeckers)(Brief article)
November 1, 2006... Ivory-billed woodpeckers seem almost as elusive as space aliens these days, so NASA may be the perfect agency to help find the mysterious birds. Scientists from the University of Maryland and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center recently used...

Ghost cat.(jaguars in New Mexico)
November 1, 2006... A hunter pursuing mountain lions in New Mexico last winter nabbed a jaguar instead--on film, The photograph, the fifth confirmed sighting of the spotted cat in the Southwest during the past decade, raises an issue that has vexed biologists for...

No eye chart necessary.(cataract surgery in bald eagles)(Brief article)
November 1, 2006... The senior citizen was bumping into furnishings in her home. She couldn't find a place to sit down, or even see her food. She was deteriorating-fast. You could say she had lost her eagle eye. Cataracts are an ailment that haunts many, but for a...

Fish overboard.(regulations on commercial fishing)(Brief article)
November 1, 2006... It's a modern tragedy in the open sea A fisherman pulls up his net or line, only to throw back dead or dying fish that don't meet regulations. Each year, scientists estimate, more than a million metric tons offish, or 28 percent of the entire...

Bug out.(border patroling by United States. Department of Homeland Security )(Brief article)
November 1, 2006... At ports across the country, patrollers are on the lookout for illegal weapons, counterfeit goods, and would-be terrorists. Now the Department of Homeland Security is employing entomologists to help protect the country from biological invaders....

Swooning swans.(research on sex life )(Brief article)
November 1, 2006... They may form lifetime partnerships, and males are especially protective of their partners, but swans--those icons of monogamy-get around the pond more than previously thought. DNA testing of black swans revealed that one in six cygnets is...

Good to the last drop.(drip irrigation is good for aquifer)
November 1, 2006... On the southern High Plains of Texas, amid swaths of cotton fields, groundwater in the region s major aquifer has been vanishing at an alarming rate--up to five acre-feet a year in the late 1950s and more than two acre-feet a year as recently...

Flipping out.(dolphins)
November 1, 2006... Dolphins ave a big problem: They're not whales. And because they're not, and have never been considered endangered, they don't enjoy the strict protections enjoyed by other cetaceans listed under the Endangered Species Act. But the current boom...

Flying high.(effects of domoic acid on pelicans )(Brief article)
November 1, 2006... She wasn't driving, but the pelican that crashed into a car on the Pacific Coast Highway last summer could have been charged with an FUI--flying under the influence. The inebriated bird was feeling the effects of domoic acid poisoning, which...

Hug a jellyfish today.(help in decreasing global warming)(Brief article)
November 1, 2006... While engineers rush to fight global warming, salps--jellyfish-dike sea creatures--are already doing their part. Marine organisms exhale C[O.sub.2] into the water; from there it can return to the atmosphere, adding to global warming. Under the...

Starling songbook.(complicated songs recognized by starlings)(Brief article)
November 1, 2006... European starlings have huge repertoires of complicated songs. They may also have an ear for grammar. Researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of California, San Diego, recently taught the birds to recognize two syntactic...

The hot seat.(James Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration)(Interview)
November 1, 2006... Having sounded the alert about global warming for three decades, James Hansen has emerged as something of a prophet. In 1988 his congressional testimony helped spur a national debate, Earlier this year, Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard...

Hang gliders: flying squirrels, the trapeze artists of the woodlands, have always been hard to see. That could get even tougher, as the squirrels' forest homes disappear.
November 1, 2006... When Mark Bloomer purchased his home in northern Maine five years ago, nobody told him that nocturnal, reddish-brown creatures already occupied the premises. "I figured they were ordinary red squirrels until I saw one take off and fly more than...

Here today, gone tomorrow: Playa lakes seem to come out of nowhere, suddenly emerging with aamong North passing shower. Shrouded in mystery, they are America's most important and imperiled wetlands, providing critical resting and foraging habitat for more than a million migrating shorebirds, ducks, geese, and songbirds.
November 1, 2006... They come in waves, drifting slowly across a cloudless December sky. Their gray necks are outstretched a quarter-mile, or so it seems, in front of an arcuate, six-foot sweep of wings, legs trailing behind as if an afterthought. Their cries fill...

Life: a journey through time: in his new book an acclaimed photographer captures the beauty and complexity of the earth's history, from its earliest stirrings billions of years ago to the majestic landscapes and wildlife that have evolved ever since.
November 1, 2006... One spring evening seven years ago, I stood at the tide line of an estuary in the eastern United States, watching something that took me far back in the past. I saw horseshoe crabs come out of the water to spawn, an ancient ritual that goes...

Eye in the sky: an airborne billboard does double duty as a research tool, providing a unique perspective on the lives of New York City's wading birds.(blimps to be used to protect colonial wading birds)
November 1, 2006... On a muggy morning in August 2005, the 200-foot-long airship rises from the concrete pad of Brooklyn's Floyd Bennett Field. It sails past the tall, still Ferris wheel at Coney Island, bobs above the stream of commuters crossing the...

Beauty & the bomb: once upon a time Isla de Vieques was alight with bombs exploded during naval exercises. Now that the military range has been turned into a wildlife refuge, the fireworks on this Puerto Rican island are created by the mysterious glowing microorganisms concealed within its bioluminescent bay.
November 1, 2006... A satellite burns across a big sky so spangled with stars that even I can pick out Saturn, Orions Belt, and the Seven Sisters. Fishing bats drop from a dark wall of mangroves and skim the bay's still surface for prey, while night-feeding great...

Knock on wood: that dining room table you're lusting after has a dirty secret: it was once a perch for macaws. Here's how to have the look you want--and a clear conscience.
November 1, 2006... Furniture craftsman Stephen Staples calls this place "The Big House." Located behind his shop and showroom in Plainville, Massachusetts, it is a capacious old warehouse, high-ceilinged and filled with derelict lumber salvaged from demolished...

Audubon directory: your quick guide to the National Audubon Society.
November 1, 2006... BOARD OF DIRECTORS CAROL M. BROWNER Chair of the Board LESLIE DACH Vice-Chair ALLEN J. MODEL Treasurer ALAN WILSON Secretary CHRISTOPHER M. HARTE VIVIAN R. JOHNSON Assistant Secretaries ...

The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth.(Book review)
November 1, 2006... The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth By E.O. Wilson W.W. Norton and Company, 175 pages, $21.95 Conservative evangelical Christians, one of the country's most influential political constituencies, are not exactly bosom buddies with...

The dawn of ecology: two centuries ago Alexander von Humboldt set out to grasp the interconnectedness of nature. In the process he sowed the seeds of today's environmentalism.(The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalis)(Book review)
November 1, 2006... The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism By Aaron Sachs, Viking, 496 pages, $25.95 Besides the cowboy, the frontiersman, the fur trapper, and the forty-niner, the American 19th century...

Voyage of the Turtle: In Pursuit of the Earth's Last Dinosaur.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 1, 2006... Voyage of the Turtle: In Pursuit of the Earth's Last Dinosaur By Carl Safina Henry Holt and Company, 400 pages, $27.50 On a balmy night in Trinidad, a huge leatherback turtle lumbers up the beach and carefully digs a hole in the sand. There...

Windswept: The Story of Wind and Weather.(Book review)
November 1, 2006... Windswept: The Story of Wind and Water By Marq de Villiers Walker & Company, 352 pages, $25 When Marq de Villiers was a boy, a gust of wind once almost blew him off a rocky ledge and into the ocean off South Africa. Ever since, wind has...

Disappearing act.(polar bears)(Brief article)
November 1, 2006... One of James Balog's most popular prints is this remarkable shot of a floating polar bear as seen above and below water. Photographed at the zoo in Portland, Oregon, with a battery of strobe lights placed at aquarium windows and on the ceiling,...