This one, deservedly, is wholly ‘for the birds’

California Condor

Hours of torrential rain, often with high winds.  Day-long snowfall with intense cold.  How and where do the birds shelter? 

So small, birds can seem so vulnerable.  And yet these beautiful, winged, often tuneful descendants of dinosaurs have proven able to cope with conditions that would baffle or defeat us.

Much like sharks, another ancient breed, birds survived after dinosaurs and others went extinct and after drastic environment changes.  But, like sharks, they’re now seriously threatened . . . by humans.

Tufted titmouse

Today, largely unaware of their long history that includes 150-million-year-old bird fossils, we take birds for granted.  They started out as feathered small, meat-eating dinosaurs (theropods) with sharp teeth that over time evolved into beaks.  

Their survival, one theory has it, occurred because they were small, could eat a variety of foods and could fly.  But now, population numbers have declined by around 3 billion birds in North America during the last 50 years alone.  http://tinyurl.com/mr385vxu  and http://tinyurl.com/2p9d6tmr

Female cardinal

Given the estimated 11,000 bird species in the world, it’s impossible to imagine the great variety that must exist among them.  But this look at some of the birds mentioned lately in the media might suggest the possibilities – and enhance the respect. There’s much more to say about birds than the common advice in health and fitness articles – listen to bird song and feel better.   

First, back to that concern about how birds survive major storms.  Their methods are surprising.  A large percentage of birds are migratory, which helps, as does their ability to detect and “read” air pressure system changes, then react accordingly.       http://tinyurl.com/3px7wz2z  

However, even in migrating, birds face obstacles, starting with habitat losses along the way http://tinyurl.com/54dme94m  and modern hazards, like building lights at night, which can attract them and cause fatal or debilitating window strikes.     http://tinyurl.com/sp9c3s2f

Pelicans & pouches

Whether stay-at-homes or travelers, birds are also affected by temperature changes, particularly severe cold snaps that can lessen survival rates of new-born hatchlings. One for-instance: cold kills nsects, so parent birds can only scout up less food for their young. 

 http://tinyurl.com/yc8d2rd7

Then this sadly familiar fact about birds: As is true in human life, birds too are sometimes the victims of sexism in science.  Male specimen birds have been found to prevail in 5 respected natural history museums, often accompanied by denigrating assumptions about female birds that were reached because of incomplete study.         http://tinyurl.com/yezzh2cd 

In short, “Half of all birds are females, yet they have long been overlooked in ornithology.”  (And yes, steps are underway to correct this practice of sex-skewing!)

Hawk

I'm not a “birder,” in the usual sense of the word, but more and more I’m intrigued by news about birds – such as word that a particular woodpecker may not be extinct after all (http://tinyurl.com/2hxar8k6 ) or that near New Zealand’s capital, conservation efforts succeeded in the hatching of kiwi eggs in the wild for “the first time in living memory.”    http://tinyurl.com/2ebhhpy6

Further, I’ve been delighted to learn that love still actively lives between 2 long-separated macaws in Brazil.  For decades now, one bird regularly visits the other and they commune between the netting that keeps them apart.  I challenge you to read their story without welling up.    http://tinyurl.com/2vjbu7yv

Chickadee

Vultures.  Did you “Ugh!” at that word alone?  Both their looks and their job of carrion-eating can prompt such reactions.  But read this story and learn how very smart these birds are in pursuing their scavenging occupation – using their “wide-angle intelligence.”       http://tinyurl.com/2y8hvnum

Stale bread with soup: wouldn’t you dip the bread to make it more palatable?  That’s just what these white parrots also do with their dry, twice-baked toast and water every day at lunch -- and they’re the first known to do so.  (Shades of our tendency to dunk biscotti!)     http://tinyurl.com/mr2jyjax

Seabird

Birds are such varied and fascinating creatures, we may all be happy about plans to improve on their North American names – to focus “attention on the unique features and beauty of the birds themselves,” rather than keeping names with “associations with the past that continue to be exclusionary and harmful today.”

Starting this year, the re-naming process will be carried out by the American Ornithological Society, and affect around 150 birds, some now named for racists, slaveholders and others now in disrepute.  As the admired writer of the article linked here says, “If renaming the birds becomes part of a broad reorientation toward nature itself, it’s a symbolic gesture that could be the start of saving it all. The birds and us.”    http://tinyurl.com/5cys36fs   

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First, a 'soft opening,' then 2 victories at sea

Ummm, so soft and luxurious: cashmere!  Everybody’s wearing it, buying or craving it.  Two-ply, three- ply and no doubt multi-ply too.  In short, cashmere has caught on, big time, most noticeably during winter holidays.    

Cashmere goat

That’s not good.

As one scientist explains, “Demand for Cashmere Is Harming the Environment” – specifically, the cold, arid pastureland of the steppes of China and Mongolia, where herders have historically raised sheep, horses, yaks, camels and other animals.  

But since it takes goats to produce cashmere fabrics from their soft downy undercoat, and cashmere is so in demand, herders increase the number of goats in their livestock.

And that’s not good either.

Unlike other animals, goats “eat plants down to the roots so they cannot regrow, degrading habitat and causing soil erosion.”  That leads to soil damage, and goats that graze on inferior rangeland produce inferior fibers, which find their way into to affordable-but-lesser cashmere sweaters. 

Yak

So the degeneration of pastureland – and cashmere – continues, while efforts to come up w/ sustainable production practices are only beginning.  One suggestion consumers are likely to reject is to forgo cashmere altogether, even though they could opt instead for soft fabrics from sheep, yaks or camels: greater quantity for less ecological damage. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/16/opinion/holidays-environment-cashmere.html

As with African elephants, “conservation” is a meaningful word today.  Now, move mentally to the US Pacific Northwest, where veterinarians have taken on a massive challenge: helping conserve a population of endangered orcas, aka “killer whales.”

Orca

About 75 in number, these so-called “Southern Residents” have earned scientists’ interest, motivating them to devise new ways to “perform veterinary exams on a wild, multi-ton marine mammal that might surface for only seconds at a time.” 

The scientists have developed methods -- including an experimental “breath-collecting drone” – to capture parts of the “clouds of mist” expelled from the whales’ blowholes!  They’re also moving toward more ways to assess these whales to learn what’s normal for them and to decide when intervention may be called for.  

BTW, the videos with this article are noteworthy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/26/science/orcas-killer-whales-veterinarians.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20231226&instance_id=111016&nl=todaysheadlines&regi_id=20760274&segment_id=153562&user_id=a360dad7b26df61ea65737080d3deedd

In the belly of the . . . whale

Giant squid

In Daniel Kraus’s novel, Whalefall, a young man named Jay enters the ocean off California to find his suicidal father’s remains.  Minus a few key elements of his diving gear, he plans to search the sea floor where he knows his father, secretly weighted down, slipped off the small boat a friend was piloting.

Once beyond the coast and near the canyon, he encounters a giant squid, is wrapped in a tentacle and sucked into the mouth of a sperm whale.  (It doesn't matter that he's only "by-catch" in the whale's pursuit of the squid.) 

Sperm whale

With his oxygen running out, his strength ebbing and his injuries mounting, Jay struggles inside the whale's first of four stomachs, adapting the detritus he encounters into escape tools and playing back his father's extensive whale knowledge and respect. 

Even though I know zip about diving and simply skimmed over chapter names and other exotica, Whalefall was compelling reading -- a real adventure story, with fascinating details about sperm whales, especially this one, allied with Jay in his escape efforts.

(Years ago, my husband and I traveled to the canyon off the NJ coast in a friend’s commercial fishing boat – a night-time voyage to a tremendously deep place that I was too naïve, or dopey, to be apprehensive about. 

(While there were no encounters with squid or whales, it was exciting enough: while we napped below in the dark, a large mackerel hook fell from a ceiling mount onto my chest – a big rat in transit, I was sure.  Later, starting at dawn, the crew winched huge lobster traps up onto the long deck. . . .)

A timely resolve

Finally, since it’s that time of year, this line from New Yorker online “humor”: “One whale says to another: “My New Year’s resolution is to lose thirty-eight thousand pounds.”

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