Innholdsfortegnelse for March - April 2015 i Audubon Magazine

GLOBAL TRADE THE 650-MILE-LONG VISTULA River, the longest in Poland, gathers in the country’s southern highlands. It courses northward through both Krakow and Warsaw before ending where this photo was taken, about 15 miles east of Gdansk, carrying the winter floes seen here into the Baltic Sea. The nation’s iron-blue artery is one segment of the E40 waterway, a system of naturally occurring rivers augmented by manmade canals that linked markets from the Black Sea to the Baltic for nearly 200 years. After World War II, however, the waterway, which also cuts through Belarus and Ukraine, was abandoned as a commercial conduit. Now the three countries hope to restore it. The economic upsides are obvious for all three countries but especially for landlocked Belarus, which would gain access to two…

A COUPLE OF DAYS AFTER Christmas, Carl Haynie and his wife, Terry Risdon, made the three-hour drive from their home in Sammamish, Washington, to the same remote beach they’ve visited every month for five years. They passed through the Seattle suburbs, hugging the rugged coast to reach their isolated, one-kilometer stretch on the Olympic Peninsula. Haynie and Risdon are beach bird monitors, two of the more than 1,200 volunteers who patrol shores from California to Alaska, recording any dead birds that wash up in their survey zone. Haynie, a software developer and longtime birder, likens the outings to treasure hunts. “You never know what you’re going to find.” He’s spotted carcasses of such rare birds as Pinkfooted Shearwaters and Black-footed Albatrosses, and deduced the identities of 40-plus species by a…

PORTRAIT Joel Sartore still remembers the feel of his bare feet sinking into the soggy carpet. It was the fall of 2005, and he was standing in a leaky trailer that passed for a hotel in Kaktovic, Alaska, where he had come to photograph a National Geographic story about leasing out Alaska’s North Slope for energy extraction. An elaborate plan to photograph a wild polar bear feeding on a whale carcass was underway, but for three days he’d been socked in by blustery winds and bad weather. So he was on the phone with his wife, Kathy, telling her the shoot was going to take longer than he thought. “There was this pause on the other end of the line,” Sartore recounted. A few minutes later he was asking, “Are…

WHEN 28-YEAR-OLD GABY D’ALESSANDRO MOVED from the Dominican Republic to New York City in 2008, she quickly became homesick for the mountains and beaches back in the D.R., so she began channeling that longing into her art. “I’m very interested in human emotions; it’s a big part of what drives my work,” she says. “And when I’m trying to find the right symbols to evoke a feeling, they’re often nature-related.” Chance encounters with Ruby-throated Hummingbirds are at once exciting and fleeting, which appealed to D’Alessandro when she created this illustration, working on a digital tablet with Photoshop as an alternative to canvas and acrylic paint. Hummingbirds are “otherworldly,” she says, “such unusual and incredibly small birds, with exotic coloration and unique flying abilities.” D’Alessandro marvels at how the tiny migrants…

AFTER TWO YEARS OF TRIAL, A FEDERAL JUDGE IN New Orleans is heading into the final stretch in deciding how much BP, the third-largest oil company in the world, will have to pay in fines for the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Predictably, BP has been trying to muddy the waters inside the courtroom through legal maneuvers and outside the courthouse with expensive, feel-good advertising campaigns. BP continues to employ the big lie strategy: It’s all better. Nothing to see here on the Gulf Coast, folks. Move along. We know that scientists are still finding oil and uncovering new damages from this catastrophe—from lung disease in dolphins to the destruction of critical wetlands. To be sure, the long-term environmental damage isn’t as easy to show in pictures and video…

AUDUBON IN ACTION SOUTH FLORIDA’S BISCAYNE BAY IS IN trouble. Algal blooms have long been a problem in the nearby Keys, where rampant algae growth is ignited by nutrient-rich agricultural runoff and waste slurries of the upstate phosphate industry. But recently the blooms have begun to appear in even the most pristine of Biscayne’s waters, threatening to smother the abundant marine life and cloud the diamond-clear brine—a disaster for hungry predators. “If hunters can’t see the prey below the surface,” says Rafael Galvez, director of the Florida Keys Hawkwatch and chair of citizen science for the Tropical Audubon Society, “the effect will trickle up to all bird populations.” There are 200 or so local species, including the threatened Wood Stork. The 225 square miles of mangrove forests and barrier islands…

HORTICULTURE BIRDS ARE APPARENTLY THE LATEST species to climb aboard the legalize marijuana bandwagon. It turns out that hemp seeds contain a wealth of omega oils that help keep avian immune systems and plumage healthy. Herb connoisseur Finn Hemingway has been strewing the nutrient-rich morsels around London for flocks of Wood Pigeons, robins, tits, sparrows, and parakeets; he’s also turned 20,000 more bird buffs and pot lovers across Europe on to the practice. Hemingway, an organic cannabis grower who refuses to reveal his face or real name to the public, launched Feed The Birds two years ago, dispensing seeds to members across Europe. The Sensi Seed Bank, a medicinal dispensary from the Netherlands, has donated the bulk of the supply, while private growers have shared samples of rare and expensive…

TRUE NATURE THE FIRST TIME I SAW A RED-cockaded Woodpecker, I was in southeastern Louisiana, chasing a ghost. It was early 2002, and I was with a group of naturalists tramping through the Pearl River Wildlife Refuge, following up on a reported sighting of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker by a lone hunter two years earlier. I’d written about that purported sighting for The New Yorker, and when I heard of the renewed search I headed back to the swamp with binoculars, a reporter’s notebook, and private dreams of birdwatching glory. This time around there was a team of top-notch birders, corporate sponsorship, a CBS camera crew, and a soundman from NPR who followed us into the swamp wearing headphones and holding aloft a great fuzz-covered boom. Midway into our quest, an…

Henrik Mouritsen was stumped. It was supposed to be a simple experiment, just the latest iteration in a classic series of tests, something two generations of ornithologists had managed to pull off before him. And it was the very foundation of his research program—the kind of thing a junior faculty member had to get right. But for some reason, he couldn’t pull it off. The idea was beautiful in its simplicity: Put captive songbirds— European Robins, in this case—in cages closed off from their surroundings, so the birds are unable to see sun, moon, or stars, and then record the direction they try to travel during the spring and fall migration seasons. Research dating back as far as the 1960s had shown that migratory birds kept in such conditions exhibit…