Snowy Owl Photo: Carl Safina For reasons not entirely certain and yet almost certainly related to high numbers of lemmings in the Canadian Arctic during 2011, thousands of Snowy Owls are visiting the lower 48 states this winter. The phenomenon was featured on national TV on NBC news, and it has been written about in [...]
Originally posted on Huffington post on 1/23/2012. I recently got a letter from the United States Federal Bird Banding Laboratory. (Yes there is such a thing.) I was pretty surprised. In the 1980s I studied seabirds and hawks, and I banded many thousands of birds. But that was a long while back. I no longer [...]
On Saturday (Jan 14, 2012), Pat and I went to look for a Snowy Owl that’s been seen in the dunes at Jones Beach, Long Island, New York. It’s been there for a few weeks and it was seen the day before we went. (It was also seen the day after.) But for us, and [...]
For two days we traveled westward from South Georgia in calm weather but dense fog, then arrived back in the Falkland Islands. On the outbound leg, the Falklands’ tree-less, rock-and-tussock profile seemed chilly and windswept. On our return, the same place seemed balmy and spring-like. The contrast between South Georgia, with its single songbird, and [...]
On our expedition’s last day on South Georgia, we went ashore on the narrowest part of the northwest coast, a wild, Lord-of-the-Rings landscape of steep rock-and-hummock slopes, howling winds and sheets of shrouding mists. This pilgrimage was prompted mainly by the chance for a visitation with nesting Gray-headed Albatrosses on the high slopes. The [...]
South Georgia is a very remote place. But with its history of whaling and whale ships, it’s not too far for rats to have reached. As on other oceanic islands where rats have reached, they’ve been devastating to the smaller seabirds. They’ve utterly wiped out the world’s southernmost songbird, the South Georgia Pipit, from much [...]
Salisbury Plain. A particularly stunning part of South Georgia’s generally stunning coast. South Georgia’s second-largest King Penguin colony, it seemed the Serengeti of penguins. We went ashore with spectacular dawn light sending a gleam across towering snow-capped crags, the white line of surf, the pearliness of penguin bellies, and enriching the gold wreaths of the [...]
Halloween found us in Fortuna Bay; dawn revealed a fog-shrouded South Georgia Island. Probably the scariest thing about this Halloween was news that the world’s human population is now 7 billion. The implications of this encompass everything. And while pundits and bloggers argue over whether rich or poor people are worst for the planet, I [...]
Days 5 and 6 we spent at sea, headed relentlessly south both days toward the unseen Falkland Islands and, by night, toward the seemingly more tangible Southern Cross. We came in and out of areas more crowded or less populated by various seabirds. The farther south, the more we left juvenile albatrosses and giant petrels. [...]
Next, we went to a large colony of Magellanic Penguins. Something like 20,000 pairs were nesting over many acres, attending eggs in burrows or scrapes under thick bushes. It was odd to see Penguins in scrub country that looked more like Texas than what you think of as penguin country. About a hundred miles south [...]
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