344 stories
Lately, it seems as if we’re encountering more and more bad behavior when we travel. And one of the most annoying habits people engage in that we’ve all had to endure at one time or another is a loud, cell phone talker in a public place, such as in an airport.
We’re always delighted when we find evidence of extreme intelligence in the “others,” such as when we learn that crows crack nuts open by using passing cars and gorillas dismantle snares to thwart poachers. While primate and corvid intelligence is well known, what may be a little less apparent is the intellectual power of parrots.
Father’s Day is June 19 this year; and although my father is no longer with us, every year on this special day I reflect on some of the many things he taught and told me.
Simply defined, zero waste is a goal where all discarded materials become resources for others to use. It eliminates all discharges to air, land or water that are a threat to animal, human, plant or planetary health. All products are reused, repaired or recycled back into nature or the marketplace.
A picture is worth a thousand words—or at least that’s the idea behind the actions of Jeremy Buckingham, a Greens Party member of the Australian Parliament.
Imagine a world without birdsong. That’s the scenario a new documentary, titled The Messenger, wants you to envision, because it could actually happen sooner than we think. Songbird populations throughout the world are in trouble. By some estimates, we may have lost almost half of the songbirds that filled the skies only 40 years ago.
There’s a classic, late 1950s, Charles M. Schulz Peanuts cartoon about watching the clouds. In it, Charlie Brown, Linus and Lucy are lying on a little hill, looking up at the sky. Lucy says, “If you use your imagination, you can see lots of things in the cloud formations.
The saying goes you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. But what about elephants? When the builders of a five-star lodge in Zambia constructed their hotel over an ancient elephant path, they assumed the pachyderms that annually used the trail in order to get to the area’s bountiful mango tree would reroute their course.
Because of many, current cultural biases around the world, vultures don’t immediately bring up in us feelings of empathy and likability. But they should. According to BirdLife International, vultures are the bringers of life—not the takers. They clean our world and halt disease, stopping the spread of anthrax, botulism, rabies and tuberculosis.
Environmental philosopher and early national park advocate John Muir wrote in his 1911 book, My First Summer in the Sierra, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” It may be the truest thing anyone ever said about nature.
Each spring, more than 500,000 sandhill cranes come together on a narrow stretch of the Platte River in central Nebraska, as they have for thousands of years.
Last week, you read about shelter dogs that are finding employment—and a new lease on life—as conservation officers in the University of Washington’s Conservation Canines (CK9) program. In the video below, you’ll see some of these dogged deputies in action.
