Nature’s Layers Unravelled – Encounters with birds, beasts, and relatives
The yellow rubber ducky in your bathtub can be more useful than you think. NASA scientists are using ducks like this to track the movement (read recession) of glaciers in Greenland and Canada. Duck out of water? Thumbing through some old articles, I’ve been pondering the fate of the world’s…
With environment finally figuring in the US Presidential Election debates, Scientific American has a nice summary of how Obama and McCain, and Biden and Palin stack up in terms of their approach to environmental issues. Listen and read The Green Ogre – Birds, Wildlife, Ecology and Nature notes from India.
Over at Life Less Plastic, Jeanne Haegele writes: And I still buy milk (in a glass container) and meat (wrapped in paper at the deli), and use my own cloth produce and grocery bags. In my three-decade-plus lifetime I have seen my parents do the same. Why, only about 15…
In spring of 2001, my good friends Bruce Lee Mani and Rajeev Rajagopal (better known as guitar player and drummer, respectively, of Thermal And A Quarter) dragged me to the Himalayas on a trek for which I was quite unprepared. Bass player Rzhude, who had been there and done that…
Numbers of the Red Squirrel, once Britain’s pride, started to dwindle when its more aggressive cousin, the American Grey Squirrel, was introduced in the country. With protection, the Red Squirrel clawed back. But recently, the squirrels have gone missing and scientists fear that a virus – squirrelpox – has wiped…
Everything you didn’t want to know about birds but probably asked about too often. “These mysterious beautiful creatures that came to our planet suddenly in 1962 are still an enigma today” [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfvEgWINUFc] via BirdChick The Green Ogre – Birds, Wildlife, Ecology and Nature notes from India.
Though not the tallest tree in the world, the Giant Sequoia is certainly the largest. Now, that has a lot of people confused. Tallest, largest… what’s the diff? The Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) wins over the Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) in terms of total volume – a factor of height…
Imagine if forest, rivers and air enjoyed rights just as we do. Next week, Ecuador will vote to give nature her rights. If passed, the law could be the first ever reversal of anthropocentric frameworks in Momma Nature’s favour. Let’s wait and see. More The Green Ogre – Birds, Wildlife,…
The BBC has a meditative article around whales, and a literary great to whose work the whale was central. Over one hundred and fifty years ago, Herman Melville pondered the future of the whale in a chapter titled Does The Whale’s Magnitude Diminish? Will He Perish? Melville, a seafarer, wrote…
If you are not entirely new to penguins and their mysterious ways, you’d know that not all of them prefer to live in snow and ice. The fantastic GeoBeats online video community has a feature on penguins in Patagonia. What surprises me is how these birds nest so casually despite…
William Blake wrote: A Robin Redbreast in a cage Puts all Heaven in a Rage. Prisons may be a good place for conservation education to begin. And prisoners may turn out to be the most sincere conservationists. But the general public – many of whom are better off incarcerated –…
There are times when a species introduces itself to you – sometimes ceremoniously, but often without fanfare. This is a seminal moment in the life of any naturalist or nature enthusiast. I remember one such feeling way back in 2001 – of being in the company of sage, wise elders…
A shortage of fish is causing nesting guillemots to kill their neighbours’ chicks. Scientists studying these hardy British birds in a colony in the Firth of Forth are anxious about an impending catastrophe. Guillemots are highly social and huddle together in vast colonies to protect themselves against marauding gulls and…
Sarah Palin, whom we love to hate for at least two things – Republican and pro-hunting – has now been condemned by our loosely united fraternity of eco-enthusiasts as a ‘global warming denier.’ Cute. Arizona’s Centre for Biological Diversity has awarded Palin the Rubber Dodo award for insisting that the…
Via AB Apana’s very engaging blog, I came across WildFilmHistory, a riveting website that chronicles one hundred years of wildlife filmmaking. The website hosts profiles of nearly a hundred wildlife filmmakers from the familiar to the obscure – Jacques Cousteau, Gerald Durrell, David Attenborough, George Schaller, Doug Allen, Jen and…
