Category: Uncategorized

Short days continue to minimise birding opportunities however you never know when something new will come your way if you keep eyes and ears open. Ears are particularly important with birds and this morning the laughing call or ‘yaffle’ alerted me to a green woodpecker in the centre of the village. These are rarely seen away from fields and park lands locally but perhaps some Autumn fare has brought them in.

Green Woodpecker Credit: David Sargant via Compfightcc

I have taken the limited late afternoon opportunities to walk the local patch before the birds go to roost. The nights quickly sweep in and many local birds are tucked up and quiet before I get out. The most noticeable recently have been the larger birds and the smallest. Pheasants have been noticeable in the local fields and tend to roost later in trees and high hedges but perhaps more surprising…

“Today, many still think of the coastal redwood forests as a dark, primeval rainforest, such as those depicted in the likes of Star Wars and Jurassic Park. However, the progress of human activity over the last 150 years has resulted in a reality which is in stark contrast to the idyllic images portrayed in Hollywood.

“The “progress” of human activity over the last 150 years has resulted in a landscape that would be unrecognizable to those first European-American settlers. Once, the ancient coastal redwood forests spanned some two million acres of California’s scenic and rugged coastline, from Big Sur all the way to the Oregon border. By the time Redwood National Park was created in 1968, a mere 100 years after the advent of European-American settlement, the once vast and mighty coastal old-growth redwood forest had been reduced to an estimated 10 percent of its original range. By the close…

Working with SAFE, climate scientist Stephen Hardwick found that palm oil plantations are on average 6.5 degrees Celsius hotter that primary (never logged) rainforest. This disparity means the difference between life and death for sensitive species like termites and earthworms that play a drastically important role in the rainforest ecosystem by controlling the rate at which things decompose. Even lightly logged forest was 2.5 degrees hotter than primary forests. In these forests, Hardwick found that the hotter it got, the more water trees used and the more vulnerable they became to droughts. This discovery casts doubt on the eco-friendliness of selective harvesting – a method of logging that in which only trees above a certain size are felled and which was previously perceived as sustainable.

“That doubt that was furthered by studies showing how the extra, unclaimed logs left behind in selective harvesting are actually doing harm to the environment…

November 2, 2015 – Searchlight NV – Last Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Miranda Du vacated the federal permits for construction of the Searchlight Wind Project in Southern Nevada. Judge Du found that environmental analyses prepared by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) inadequately evaluated the dangers that the industrial-scale wind project would pose to desert wildlife. She cited data missing from the agency surveys, inadequate assessment of potential threats to golden eagles, desert tortoises, and bats, and the need for additional explanation of the agencies’ conclusions. If the developer, Apex Clean Energy, wants to proceed with the project, the BLM would need to prepare a new Environmental Impact Statement to address the deficiencies she identified. The USFWS would also have to prepare a new Biological Opinion. This important decision will protect eagles nesting near the project site, the highest-density desert tortoise habitat…

BREAKING: The US House of Representatives just voted to pass H.R.2494, the Global Anti-#Poaching Act. Special thanks to House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce and Ranking Member Eliot Engel for introducing the Act and championing it through to a vote. Building off the momentum from the Enough Project’s event on the Hill last week, this act is a crucial step in the effort to break the links between wildlife trafficking networks and mass atrocities. This is an incredible victory, and one YOU made happen! This is truly Justice For Cecil The Lion!

The Hidatsa or Minnetaree Native People named Yellowstone National Park Mitseadazi which means yellow rock river.

Since then scholars have gotten into all sorts of disagreements about where the Hidatsa saw these yellow rocks in Yellowstone.

I don’t really get the disagreements, yellow rocks and stones are everywhere here!

This is my last post on the American West.

I can imagine how beautiful it must be now,

filling with silent snow,

as the critters hunker down,

for the long, cold, Yellowstone winter.
Cheers to you from the finally raining Holler_