"You lookin' at me?"
A male Northern Cardinal enjoys a meal of sunflower seed hearts in my backyard this week. These seeds have proved to be a very popular menu item for my backyard birds.*~*~*~*
Once again emphasizing the potential for disaster that drilling for oil in the Arctic brings, a Shell oil rig that was being towed through the Gulf of Alaska broke free and ran aground on Sitkalidak Island. The good news is that so far the oil rig seems to be intact and is not yet leaking any fuel into the pristine waters.
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Meanwhile, Transocean, whose Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico almost three years ago, leading to the biggest oil spill in the nation's history, has agreed to settle civil and criminal claims with the federal government for a sum of $1.4 billion.
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We've long known that the human brain responds to music in different ways based on the listener's emotions. Scientists have now determined that the same is true of birds listening to birdsong.
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Historically, there were three subspecies of one-horned (Javan) rhinoceroses in Southeast Asia. Now, with confirmation that the last of the Vietnamese rhinos has perished, there is only one subspecies left - the Sumatran, and they are critically endangered with only about 250 left in the wild.
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The Ring-necked Pheasant, an introduced species long popular with hunters in the Midwest, is disappearing from Iowa and those who hunt the birds are following. Loss of income from the hunter-tourists is having an economic impact on the area. The disappearance of the bird, in addition to hunting, is attributed mostly to loss of appropriate habitat.
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When I was in college, my freshman English literature class, at the behest of Mrs. Robinson our teacher, started a "Shakespeare Garden" on campus with the aim of planting an example of all the plants mentioned by Shakespeare. Now it seems that a painter has a similar goal. He is painting feathers of the birds mentioned by Shakespeare.
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The endangered Black Grouse is making an encouraging comeback in the UK. The surge in population is attributed to better monitoring and protection of habitat.
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It isn't only the Javan rhinoceros that is in trouble. Its African cousin is facing an unprecedented wave of poaching that is quickly reducing the continent's population of rhinos in spite of wildlife officials' best efforts to protect them. Several hundred of the animals were killed in 2012, and all the killers take from the carcass is the horn.
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The health of Chesapeake Bay, a very polluted body of water, has improved slightly according to a foundation which tracks such things. Even so, it would still only earn a grade of D+ according to those officials. Still, that's better than an F!
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Migratory bird deaths at oil and gas operation waste pits have been reduced by 50-75 percent in the last 15 years due to tighter regulations and monitoring. An estimated one-and-a-half million birds have been saved from a grisly death because of those regulations which some of our short-sighted and environmentally ignorant politicians would do away with if they could.
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Around the backyard:
It's been a cold and wet week, not really conducive to spending much time outside with the birds. Most of the birding that I've done has been from the porch or from windows. We even postponed our January trip to Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge a second time because of the weather.
In spite of the weather though, there is no shortage of birds in the yard and at the feeders. I watched through my study window today as a constant parade of a variety of birds visited my front yard feeder. It was even visited by one bird who wasn't feeding but just using it as a perch.
It looks like the next several days will continue to be inclement and my "year list" will continue to lag. Oh, well, I'll just have to try to make up for it later.
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