Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2021 i Audubon Magazine

TWENTY YEARS AGO, TONY Kuchma took charge of restoring the Oneida Nation’s wetlands in northeastern Wisconsin. The land was marked by old mills and farm operations. The water was polluted. The fields were overrun with non-native plants. In the decades since, Kuchma and his team have rehabilitated about 3,000 acres of the reservation. “Large-scale restoration is an accumulation of years of effort,” he says. “We’re looking at the land: Some wants to be prairie, some trees, some wetland. The land tells you what it wants to be again.” Now streams flow where ditches stood, and there’s a renewed wildlife presence. “We’ve had eagles come back,” says Randy Cornelius, a cultural representative of the tribe. “I’ve seen ospreys, cormorants, ducks I’ve never seen before.” Species abundance is a reliable marker of…

… TO BE AWED BY BIRDS Becoming enthralled with another species can teach us a lot about the world and ourselves. In his debut book, A Most Remarkable Creature (Knopf, $30, 384 pages), indie rock musician Jonathan Meiburg relates how his decades-long fascination with Striated Caracaras sent him chasing the birds through remote areas of South America. The enigmatic and intelligent raptors, whose presence on the remote Falkland Islands mystified Charles Darwin in the 1830s, captivated Meiburg as a new college graduate nearly two centuries later. His quest to uncover the evolutionary mystery of caracaras is part travelogue, part natural history, and fully an ode to these resilient birds. ALSO TRY: The Hummingbirds’ Gift, by Sy Montgomery (Atria, $20, 96 pages), a tender and true account of the author’s experience helping…

BEFORE TEACHING herself wildlife photography, Carla Rhodes worked in comedy as a ventriloquist. This gave her an interest in new perspectives and a tolerance for failure, attributes she brought to bear last winter in a four-month effort to snap images of small, speedy animals beneath her yard’s SquirrelBuster Classic feeder. As birds ate, they dropped seed on the ground, where Rhodes had placed a Canon 5D Mark IV DSLR in a protective camera box. When animals foraged for fallen seed, a sensor that detects their body heat and motion signaled the flash and shutter. Her wide-angle macro lens also captured the backdrop of New York’s Catskill Mountains, but required her subjects to come “within an inch” of the camera. She adjusted settings in advance: high aperture to focus on close-up…

AS THIS ISSUE GOES TO PRESS, I’ve just returned from the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, where I shared with the global climate movement what birds are telling us about our changing environment. The effects of climate change on birds are undeniable. Take, for example, the Atlantic Puffin. These vulnerable seabirds have had a particularly devastating year, especially the fluffy young pufflings. Audubon’s Seabird Institute reports that warming waters have driven away most of the fish that puffins like to eat, leaving them to feed their pufflings butterfish, a species that is too big for young chicks to swallow. Making matters worse, a series of storms also kept them dangerously cold and wet as they were hatching, and as a consequence, less than half the usual number of…

AS NATURE PHOTOGRAPHERS in Colombia, home to more than 300 types of ecosystems and one-tenth of the planet’s biodiversity, we’ve seen our share of stunning views. But the Mavecure Hills in southeastern Colombia, pictured below, stand out as one of the most breathtaking places we’ve visited. The formations are sacred to Indigenous communities in the area, who consider them homes of gods. The three massive mounds, reachable only by a two-hour boat trip on the Inírida River, do indeed stand like mighty guardians looking out over the Amazon jungle. We were especially drawn to the largest of these hills, not just because it towers some 2,300 feet high, but also because it is called Pajarito, or “little bird.” Our trip on the Inírida was just one snippet of our quest…

EACH SPRING AND FALL, BIRDERS across North America enjoy the sight of White-crowned Sparrows, Blackpoll Warblers, and other migratory species making their way to and from nesting grounds in northern Manitoba, Canada. Millions of birds rely on the Seal River watershed, an expanse of more than 19,000 square miles of wetlands, tundra, and forest—roughly the size of Vermont and Massachusetts combined. Now the Sayisi Dene, who live in the watershed, in partnership with Cree, Dene, and Inuit neighbors with interests in the area, are coming together to permanently conserve the ecosystem. “As Indigenous people, we understand how important the watershed is to our livelihoods and futures,” says Seal River Watershed Alliance director Stephanie Thorassie, a member of the Sayisi Dene First Nation. “We also understand how important it is to…

MANY OF THE MOST ICONIC IMAGES OF BIG BEND National Park feature the jagged outline of the Sierra del Carmen, a towering range of pine- and fir-studded mountains in the Mexican state of Coahuila. These isolated peaks possess an almost magnetic mystique—nearly everyone I’ve spoken to who has spent time in this part of West Texas talks about gazing across the border and imagining what it must be like to stand among the tall trees and cool wind, looking out in the opposite direction at the desert below. Rick LoBello first came to Big Bend in 1974 and spent the next six years working as a park ranger, looking up at the Carmens and dreaming about their secrets. Then, in 1988, he joined a delegation invited to discuss prospects for…

Mosquitoes to the Rescue! This fall, the U.S. government proposed that eight Hawaiian avian species be declared extinct. The same forces that spurred the birds’ declines still threaten Kaua'i’s eight remaining native forest birds; of those, disease-transmitting mosquitoes are the most insidious. Scientists are preparing a powerful weapon to rid the island of the introduced pests: bacterial birth control. In a lab, male mosquitoes’ bacteria are altered. When released into the wild, eggs they fertilize won’t hatch, causing the mosquito population to crash—or so experts hope. Will the innovative approach give birds a chance to recover? Read the story at audubon.org/mosquito. RE: “Greetings from Florida, The Land of Ibis” I was surprised to read about the adaptive behavior of White Ibis in the Fall issue of Audubon. I recently relocated…

THIS YEAR, DEADLY FRIGID WINTER TEMPERATURES in Texas gave way to excruciating summer heat in the Northwest. Wildfires raged across California. In late August, Hurricane Ida devastated Louisiana and caused unprecedented flooding in the Northeast. If you’ve thought headlines about U.S. weather and climate disasters have become increasingly common, you’re right. In the 1980s only three events per year, on average, caused more than $1 billion in damage (inflation adjusted). The 2010s averaged around 12 such disasters a year—and 2020 made history with 22. This year’s 18 events, as of early October, set another record for the first nine months of any year since NOAA began keeping track in 1980. The “billion-dollar” cost metric is an arbitrary milestone, but its rise reveals several troubling trends, says NOAA applied climatologist Adam…

THERE HAS TO BE A LAST OF EVERYTHING: PASSENGER Pigeons, unicorns, Jedis, suppers. One of birding’s most historic and influential institutions isn’t quite there yet, but the phone services that announce unusual bird sightings—known as Rare Bird Alerts, hotlines, or dial-a-bird numbers—are clearly an endangered species. Cutting-edge in their day, these services capitalized on emerging telecommunications technology to deliver news to birders in what then would have been considered real time. The Rare Bird Alert loomed large in my childhood. My parents were divorced, and my brother and I spent weekends with my bird-obsessed father. While other kids passed their Saturdays attending matinées or playing Little League, our afternoons followed a different routine: After arriving at my dad’s house, we’d call the New York Rare Bird Alert. We’d crowd by…

SOCIALLY CONSCIOUS INVESTING IS BOOMING. Whether you’re designating 401(k) contributions for 2021 or planning 2022 savings, consider ways to achieve your financial goals while backing sustainable business practices. As crises like climate change, biodiversity loss, and inequality force corporations to adapt, both your bottom line and the world’s can benefit from investing in companies ahead of the curve. WHAT AM I INVESTED IN? If you don’t know what the terms “expense ratio,” “annual return,” “mutual fund,” or “exchange-traded fund (ETF)” mean, boost your financial literacy first. Then investigate what you already own. In employer-sponsored retirement plans, many people select the “default” fund at sign-up and don’t look at it again. Read the prospectus, or even better, look up the non-profit As You Sow—its website offers an invaluable search tool for…