The Precarious Life and Untimely Death of Whooper 4-11

By: | January 13, 2017

The Goose Pond Fish and Wildlife Area, a patch of restored prairie and wetland in southwestern Indiana, is a a favorite stopover for migratory birds and itinerant birders. On January 3, while driving the grid of ruler-straight county roads around the wetland, a birder saw an unmistakable large, white shape: it was a whooping crane, one of the most endangered birds in North America, and it appeared to have been shot dead with a high-powered rifle.

The birder, who happened to be a volunteer with the International Crane Foundation (ICF) in Baraboo, Wisconsin, reported the find to state wildlife officials. The investigation is now in the hands of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the crane’s five-foot-tall carcass is under examination at the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory in southern Oregon. For the scientists and conservationists who have spent decades trying to coax whooper populations back to self-sustaining numbers, the news of the shooting was crushingly familiar: 33 whooping cranes have been shot and killed in the United States since the year 2000, according to records obtained by Lizzie Condon of ICF. That’s a huge toll on a species with only about 440 free-roaming members.

Continue reading →

Wind, the uninvited houseguest

By: | January 12, 2017

Perhaps 500 yards from my door—up an icy, winding driveway, a short way down a gravel road, beyond barbed wire fences and snow-skirffed pastures and the wind-twisted trunks of piñon and juniper trees—is a barn that shelters two sailboats in the middle of the Colorado desert. I first spotted them on a walk and stopped to stare. The nearest large reservoir is more than two hours away from the house I am borrowing here; the ocean, more than 16 hours away.

But as freezing gusts combed fingers through my hair, grasped and numbed my hands, the sailboats began to make a certain sense. This desert breaks in waves to the horizons like an ocean, troughed with canyons, crested with rimrock and foamed with sage and rabbitbrush. And since I arrived two weeks ago, its surface has been slapped by just the kind of steady wind that would make those sailboats fly across water. Perhaps, I thought, they’re waiting for their moment to take wing through the air, instead.

I came to western Colorado for a brief stint of solitude, quiet, and space after a hectic three months. My home in Portland, Oregon, borders a busy thoroughfare. Cars grind by day and night. Drunk people yell from sidewalk corners. There is no escaping the glare of streetlights. When I’m anxious – as I have often been with recent writing projects and the turmoil that’s followed the presidential election – I can’t sleep until I stuff my head under a stack of pillows, simulating the peaceful, pitch-black rural nights that were the norm in my adult life before I moved to the city.

And yet while the desert has delivered more space than I know what to do with, the quiet and solitude I hoped for have been hard to come by. Because the same wind that clutches at my hair and clothes on my walks is always dropping by the house to visit. Continue reading →

Redux: The Wonderful World of Oz…and Science

By: | January 11, 2017

Adventure! Newfangled flying machines! This book has it all! This post originally appeared here on December 3, 2013.

Dorothy_and_the_Scarecrow_1900

 

Lately I’ve been reading my way through the series of Oz books. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is only the first in a series of 14 books, and it’s not remotely the best.

It’s fascinating to reread books I loved as a child. Some are still great. Others have inexplicably morphed into poorly-written, preachy duds. Fortunately, the Oz books are the former type. They were published between 1900 to 1920 and vary in quality, but the made-up world is fun and Baum’s sense of humor holds up well.

In The Patchwork Girl of Oz, the seventh book in the series, I was surprised—and pleased—to encounter a bit of science. Even better, it’s totally outdated science. Continue reading →

Same River Twice

By: | January 10, 2017

Since last week, we’ve been watching the weather forecast with something that’s almost joy, but won’t quite let itself be. Often, the weekly report has a beaded string of sunshines, with different ways to describe them. Abundant sunshine. Plenty of sun. Hot. Sometimes, there are clouds. But even when the slot machine lineup of my weather app has a series of rainy days, I’ve learned to wait until I see the silver falling. Ever optimistic, the forecast will show those lucky rainstorms even when the chance of rain is as low as 10 percent.

But now, we’re deep in the river. An atmospheric river carries moist air—a strong one channels as much as 15 times the flow at the mouth of the mighty Mississippi. This influx of water vapor can result in a series of storms that can last for days, or even weeks. (There’s a cool graphic of how they work here.) Over the weekend, forecasters were predicting that this was going to be the most powerful series of storms in a decade. Snow, rain, flooding—some forecasts predicted the Santa Cruz Mountains alone could get 10 inches of rain. Continue reading →

Just Have Lunch

By: | January 9, 2017

I wish I could remember – but I can’t  – the woman who told me a story about how she and other women in her profession had regular lunches, casually, unofficially, no agenda.  Was she a lawyer? A writer? An astronomer?  Just don’t remember.  The thing I’m sure about is that the point was not that the women met for lunch, it was that the men they worked with noticed that they met.  The men didn’t get snippy, didn’t make comments, just noticed:  something like, “saw that you were at one of your lunches.”

Now there’s a thought.  I’ve spent a certain amount of my career writing about women in science and the gender-related issues they deal with, including how to get attention paid to their research, how to get taken seriously, and how to get enough power.  Why even be in a profession unless your voice gets heard and you can do things that you’re good at, things worth doing, the things worth your time on earth?  Even the paleolithics wanted to have the things they made (I stole this idea from Jacob Bronowski, around minute 14:45), show the shapes of their hands.  Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | January 7, 2017

A humpback whale spy-hopping.January 2-6, 2017

To assert one’s humanity is to make choices, even when that choice is to die, says Jenny. “When the time was right, the woman nodded to her doctor, who deactivated the pacemaker that was pumping blood to her heart. The woman died quietly with friends close, exactly the way she’d intended.”

Ann finds the connection between history and storytelling in the Native American accounts of tsunamis, passed down the generations. Then she consults historians about the narrative enterprise. “The proper arraying up of evidence, with narrative devices, in stories about the past—this is how we make meaning.”

Helen feels that Moby Dick is misunderstood. It’s a book about whales, not about manly feelings. “The narrator comes down confidently on the fish side of the fish-or-not debate, which is not how we divide up animals these days, but hey, categories are fuzzy.”

Craig makes films about the rare remaining wilderness regions that remind us humans are not all there is. “Billions of butterfly wings flapping at once changes the way air moves, the way clouds gather and part. Countless voices can move this human machine, can give it a heart.”

Panama’s Gatun Lake plays host to an invasive fish. Ecologists have returned to replicate a 50-year-old study of the species’ introduction. Turns out it’s permanent. “As a voracious hunter, the peacock bass had easy access to all the prey species that never co-evolved with something that would chase them.”

Photo: Helen Fields

The Freshwater Bullies of Gatun Lake

By: | January 6, 2017

The crocodiles should not be a problem. Yes, the population has spiked after being placed under protection, and there have been some attacks recently. But those attacks tend to happen when somebody steps right into the water. The crocs all hang out in the shallows. Stay out of the water and you should be fine. So said the team of forest rangers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

Diana Sharpe looked down at her mesh beach seine—the big, soft net she would use to drag across the water just off the beach and catch the little shallow-water fish for sampling. She looked over at her little tin boat with its outboard engine.

“We just tried to basically be very vigilant. We saw lots of crocodiles, but if we came to a spot where we were planning to sample and we saw footprints or evidence of crocodiles we would leave and try another spot,” says Sharpe.

Gatun Lake, which comprises 33 of the 77 kilometres of the Panama Canal, has a peacock bass problem. The locals don’t see it as a problem—even if they happen to know it’s not native they defend its value as a great sport fish—but it’s the kind of apex predator the Panama Canal region had never seen. That is, until 1967, when a business man’s pond, stocked with a hundred of the South American fish for his employees’ enjoyment on weekends, overflowed during a heavy rain. Little juvenile peacock bass escaped into the Chagres River and from there into Lake Gatun. Continue reading →

Reason for Hope

By: | January 5, 2017

I joined a film crew several years ago in Chilean Patagonia where we put together a  flick opposing dams along the turquoise rivers of the Aysén region. At the time, stopping the advance of some of the biggest investors in the world seemed impossible. But soon more films were made, protests ignited across the country to save its wildest rivers, and a $10 billion mega-dam project was halted.

I can’t claim more than a bit part, a grain of sand, but somehow all of the grains add up. Continue reading →