Good News for Yellowstone’s Bison

Adult bison and calf in Yellowstone National Park. Photo: Arturo de Frias Marques.

Some people travel to kill the wildlife. Others travel to admire the same wildlife living in its natural habitat.

Most readers will surely be aware of the mass slaughter of the American Bison during the 1880s, when bison herds numbering in their tens of thousands were reduced to giant piles of bleached white bones in just a few short years. Thankfully, enough bison survived the slaughter to begin the reintroduction of this magnificent creature to some of America's national parks, including Yellowstone National Park.

In a previous post (Ending The Elephant Slaughter), I wrote about the campaign to end the continuing slaughter of this great animal for its ivory. In this post I am reproducing an article from the American Defenders Of Wildlife organisation that fights for the survival of many ever diminishing species on the North American continent, while also championing the reintroduction of threatened species to their former natural habitat.

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It’s getting better all the time for Yellowstone’s bison. 

Under Gov. Steve Bullock, the state of Montana is at last allowing bison that leave Yellowstone National Park to roam free year-round on almost 400,000 acres. And the National Park Service announced in January it is moving forward with a plan to relocate some of Yellowstone’s bison to tribal and public lands rather than send them to slaughter.

Bison wander at will when they stay inside park boundaries. But when snow falls in Yellowstone’s high country and grazing becomes difficult, bison often trek to lower ground outside the park. In the past, they were allowed only a tiny portion of public land during winter when cattle are not present. Not all bison leave the park, but those that did risked being rounded up and sent to slaughter in years when their numbers exceeded an arbitrary cap of 3,000.

Last year, some 900 animals were killed—just for searching beyond park boundaries for food. Defenders has long opposed the slaughter and advocated for wild bison restoration to the Great Plains as a much-needed alternative. 

In recent years, Defenders helped the Assiniboine, Gros Ventre and Sioux tribes of Fort Peck and Fort Belknap Indian reservations bring Yellowstone bison back to their ancestral lands. 

The latest relocation of 130 genetically pure bison (no cattle genes) occurred last year. These bison were the first “graduates” of a 15-year effort to study the feasibility of quarantining and testing bison for brucellosis. This contagious disease originally spread to bison and elk from Old World cattle in the last century. Ranchers often opposed bison grazing outside the park because brucellosis can cause cows to miscarry. However, there has not been a single documented case of bison transmitting the disease to cattle in the wild in Montana. 

“Yellowstone’s bison are our nation’s most genetically valuable bison,” says Steve Forrest, Defenders’ senior representative for the Rockies and Plains. “They are essential in our efforts to restore the species across North America and for too long they have been needlessly sent to slaughter. We are delighted with the governor’s new rule that gives bison room to roam. It finally acknowledges that bison are wildlife, not livestock, and recognizes that their seasonal, age-old winter migration routes know no political boundaries. Further, the park’s proposal is a win-win for bison and for the American public. We are so proud to see all our hard work paying off.” 

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Only select articles from Defenders are available online. To receive 4 issues annually of the full award-winning magazine, click here to become a member of Defenders of Wildlife!

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The Serendipitous Life

I was reflecting on the nature of serendipity today, and thought I might as well write about it here. But first here’s one dictionary explanation for the word serendipitous:

serendipitous |ˌsɛr(ə)nˈdɪpɪtəs|

adjective : occurring or discovered by chance in a happy or beneficial way: a serendipitous encounter. 

So what sparked this post today? I am about half way through reading What The Robin Knows, by Jon Young. Subtitled, How Birds Reveal the Secrets of The Natural World, the book is a fascinating examination of the many signs and clues that birds use in their everyday lives.

“A lifelong birder, tracker, and naturalist, Jon Young is guided by three basic premises: the robin, junco, and other songbirds know everything important about their environment, be it backyard or forest; by tuning in to their vocalizations and behavior, we can acquire much of this wisdom for our own pleasure and benefit; and the birds’ companion calls and warning alarms are just as important as their songs.” Source: Amazon.com

The internet, is of course a perfect example of serendipity in action. By following hyperlinks, web users are led from page to page and site to site, following links, interests, hunches and clues that often lead users far and wide across the modern web to places they never expected to go. Such was my discovery of Jon Young and his books, of which What The Robin Knows is just one of many.

Today, while checking through my Facebook page, the image you below popped up on my personal feed. The image was posted on the Facebook page of the Presidio of San Francisco and shared by one of my favourite American authors, Rebecca Solnit. Here is the description provided by the Presido of San Francisco: 

This morning our wildlife ecologist managed to snap a picture of a rare sighting of a grey fox! The last record of a grey fox sighting in the Presidio was in 2004. The fox scrambled onto some branches along with a raven as a coyote prowled around a bush below. Thanks to Jon Young for the incredible picture!

Fox and Raven, by Jon Young

What? thought I. Jon Young? Surely, this must be the same Jon Young that I am currently reading. I immediately headed over to the Presidio’s website and searched for Young’s name, and sure enough, I discovered that Jon had recently completed a free ‘Bird Language Leaders Workshop’ for the Presidio.

Forget ’six degrees of separation’, sometimes only three or four degrees separate us from each other—if not fewer. It is interesting (and probably futile) to speculate whether I would have paid attention to the image if I had not already been reading Jon Young’s book. Interesting too, to wonder about the coincidences that bring these disparate threads together and connect them in ways that seem totally random and unexpected.

Certainly, if I had not ‘discovered’ the books of Rebecca Solnit a year or so ago, I would never have connected with her via Facebook. And if I had not been browsing through iBooks for titles of interest a few weeks ago, I would never have seen What The Robin Knows or discovered the work of Jon Young. It is even possible, if not likely, that given the constant stream of Facebook updates I might have missed Rebecca Solint’s post if I had not checked my page when I did, and therefore missed the reference to Jon Young, and so on and on, and on.

Coincidence? Serendipity? Chance? Dumb luck? Who knows? But since I am writing about Facebook, birds, and the serendipitous nature of life, I will leave you with a video that also turned up on my Facebook stream this week which features a murmuration of starlings. The video is from Paul Tomlinson and at six minutes in length is quite mesmerising and meditative. Enjoy.

More Information

Jon Young online… 

The Presidio of San Francisco… 

Rebecca Solnit… 

In Review: Wild New York

I am slowly working my way through the pile of books I left behind in Greece following my 2010 visit to America. One of these is Wild New York: A Guide to the Wildlife, Wild Places and Natural Phenomena of New York City by Margaret Mittelbach and Michael Crewdson.

What a fascinating read Wild New York turned out to be. Essentially two books in one, Wild New York examines the human history of New York City, as well as the natural history waiting to be discovered in each of the five boroughs.

Wild New York includes:

• Dozens of  Wild Facts describing the city's worst snow storms, the best places to watch the sunset, the rarest animals, the highest points, the healthiest forests, and the hottest spots for bird-watching

• Fascinating biographies of the city's animals, from the much maligned pigeon and the dreaded rat, to falcons nesting on Park Avenue and sharks lurking off Coney Island

• A history of the city's 1.1 billion-year-old geologic past, including the unearthing of a mastodon's 10,000-year-old bones in Manhattan

• Sixteen pages of color photographs showing rare views of New York City and its wildlife

• Directions for 33 walking tours in parks and wildlife refuges throughout New York City with 18 detailed maps to help urban eco-tourists find nature in the city.

Speaking of walking tours: during two of my extended visits to New York City I have been lucky enough to stay in Washington Heights, within easy walking distance of two of the parks mentioned in Wild New York―Fort Tryon Park and Inwood Hill Park. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a copy of the book with me on my walks through these parks which meant I often walked right past geological formations and historical landmarks completely oblivious to their existence and importance. Wild New York includes walking tours for both these parks, as well as two walking tours for Central Park and numerous other locations.

If I have any complaints about Wild New York, one would be the format of the book, which in the hardcover version has dimensions measuring 9.1 x 7.4 inches. This makes the book somewhat bulky and inconvenient to tote around the city comfortably if one wants to use it ‘on location’.

Although completely understandable, given the 1997 publication date, another complaint is the absence of internet addresses for the many organizations and individuals mentioned throughout the book. Wild New York is crying out for an updated reprint that would solve this issue. Better yet, an updated Wild New York would also be available as an eBook making the information in it even more accessible to the urban explorer.

On the positive side, the chapter detailing 33 parks, nature areas and wildlife refuges in Wild New York provides a comprehensive overview of the whole city. All the major parks are of course examined here, from Central Park and the New York Botanical Garden to Prospect Park and Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Less well known is the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge adjacent to JFK airport, and Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx. Staten Islanders may be familiar with the Staten Island Greenbelt, but how many other New Yorkers (let alone visitors) have taken the time to visit there? Or Alley Pond Park in Queens? Or Breezy Point, and Plumb Beach?

The good news is that Wild New York makes it easy to visit these places by providing clear ‘How to get there’ details for visitors using public transport or their own vehicles. Having said that, another criticism comes to mind regarding the walks detailed in the book, and that is the lack of information about the walking distances involved. It is not always possible to know whether to allocate one hour, three hours, or more for some of the suggested walks just by looking at the maps. Nor is it always clear if the terrain is flat and easy to cover or hilly and harder to negotiate. An updated reissue of Wild New York would hopefully address these concerns and the others previously mentioned.

Despite my caveats, I discovered a wealth of interesting facts and historical information about New York that was previously unknown to me, and I would venture to say that even long term residents of the city will discover much about their home within the pages of Wild New York, that they are completely unaware of.

“Whether a native New Yorker or visiting from out of town, if you have the interest or the inkling to find hundred foot trees, tidal pools, salt marshes, Native American caves, hilltop vistas, or even just learn which wildflowers grow between the sidewalk slabs or which trees are tough enough to stand up to the stress of city life, this book is for you.”
~ Vincent M. Silenzio on September 26, 2000 (Amazon Review)

I suspect Wild New York has been long out of print, and your best bet for finding a copy is by scouring your local bookshop or online via Amazon or Abe Books, both of which have copies available.

TED on Tuesday: Camille Seaman: Storm Chaser

Image courtesy TED and Camille Seaman

As a keen traveller, I have taken more than my share of photographs at each stop on my extended journeys. As good as some of these photographs are, I still don’t consider myself a real photographer. I am more the happy amateur who occasionally gets lucky and is able to get the lighting and the angles right to come away with some half decent images.

Camille Seaman on the other hand, has been taking photographs all over the world, and since 2003, she has focussed her eyes (and cameras) on some of the worlds most fragile environments. Seaman's photographs have been published in Newsweek, Outside, Zeit Wissen, Men's Journal and more, and she has self-published many books on themes like “My China” and “Melting Away: Polar Images” through Fastback Creative Books, a company that she co-founded. In 2008, she was honored with a one-person exhibition, The Last Iceberg, at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC.

In today’s TED on Tuesday, I am featuring two short presentations made by Camille (who was raised as a Shinnecock Indian), at TED conferences. The first, highlights her nascent career as a storm chaser hunting down and photographing supercell clouds―some of which can be 50 miles wide, reach sixty thousand feet in the atmosphere and release grapefruit-sized hail. The second short video features stunning images of those fascinating monoliths we know as icebergs.

“Storm-chasing is a very tactile experience … The colors in the clouds, of hail forming, the green and the turquoise blues. The movement, the way they swirl … As I stand under them, I understand what I have the privilege to witness is the same forces, the same process in a small version, that created our galaxy, solar system, our sun, this very planet.” ~ Camille Seaman

Camille Seaman: Photos from a storm chaser

 “It is not a death when [icebergs] melt; it is not an end, but a continuation of their path through the cycle of life. Each iceberg has its own individual personality. Some refuse to give up and hold on to the bitter end, while others can't take it anymore and crumble in a fit of dramatic passion.” ~ Camille Seaman

Camille Seaman: Haunting photos of polar ice

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TED Online…

Camille Seaman…

Armchair Travel: Rewilding Europe

Rewilding Europe wants to make Europe a wilder place, with much more space for wildlife, wilderness and natural processes. The organization aims to rewild one million hectares of land by 2020, creating 10 magnificent wildlife and wilderness areas of international quality. To this end the organization has already begun focusing on Europe’s huge areas of abandoned land, and on providing a viable business case for the support and promotion of wild nature.

To date, Rewilding Europe has focussed on five regions: Western Iberia, the Eastern and  Southern Carpathians, the Danube Delta, and Velebit (Croatia).

Rewilding Europe is an initiative by WWF Netherlands, ARK Nature, Wild Wonders of Europe and Conservation Capital.

More Information:

Video produced by Studio Kuskus Berlin…

Rewilding Europe…

My Bucolic Rural Idyll

Early morning fog at Mt. Crawford

I have just completed a two week house sitting gig in the Adelaide Hills, near the delightful hills town of Gumeracha. To be more precise, the property was located at Mt. Crawford, and to be even more precise, I was pet sitting rather than house sitting. I suspect the area would have been isolated enough and safe enough for the owners of the property to simply lock the house up and leave it for two weeks, but having a very active and friendly house dog necessitated having someone live on site and care for the canine, and since it was there―the house.

Not that I’m complaining.

Actually, I will complain now that I think of it. I woke up most mornings bloody freezing (if I may be permitted to use the Great Australian Adjective). While it is not quite the middle of winter right now in the southern hemisphere, it has still been cold enough to freeze the you-know-whats off a brass monkey. Especially at Mt. Crawford.

Alert coney grazing close to house

Still, despite the cold nights and even colder mornings, I did enjoy my brief bucolic rural idyll. Every morning the day was sung in by a bevy of magpies and kookaburras which seemed to be competing with each other over which species could make the most noise at 5:30 in the morning!

By the way, as well as being referred to as a 'gulp' or 'murder' of magpies, the collective name for a group of magpies also includes 'A tiding' or 'charm' of magpies. Maybe this accounts for their early morning carousing and carolling. There doesn’t appear to be a collective name for kookaburras, so may I humbly submit ‘a comedy of kookaburras’ in honour of their distinctive ‘laugh’?

If I got up early enough―I never did, of course―I might have been lucky enough to see several rabbits gambolling about near the house. How do I know there were rabbits gambolling about near the house? Because they also liked to hop about just as dusk was approaching, as long as they couldn’t see or hear either myself or the very active and friendly house dog.

A trio of kangaroos working their way across the lower paddock

Along with the rabbits, the magpies, and the kookaburras, early morning and early evening was the perfect time to observe a mob of kangaroos as they slowly left the nearby forest and grazed in the property’s lower paddock. Actually, the kangaroos left the relative safety of the forest in the evening, and by mid morning they could be seen eating their way back towards the trees again. In between their evening exit from the forest, and their morning re-entry into it, they often spent the night working their way right up to house, grazing as they went. This I knew from the many droppings they left behind, just metres from the back patio.

I know there are deer roaming wild in the Mt. Crawford forest, but only once did I observe several of these beautiful creatures leave the forest one evening, and graze well away from the main house.

My bucolic country getaway. Early morning fog greets early morning sun.

On a previous house sitting gig for the same owners, I was lucky enough to see an echidna while out walking the dog late in the afternoon. Australian echidnas (sometimes known as spiny anteaters), are small, solitary mammals covered with coarse hair and spines that resemble the anteaters of South America and other spiny mammals such as hedgehogs and porcupines. Unlike hedgehogs and porcupines though, which give birth to live young, the echidna (which is a mammal) lays an egg! According to Wikipedia:

Echidnas and the platypus are the only egg-laying mammals, known as monotremes. The female lays a single soft-shelled, leathery egg 22 days after mating, and deposits it directly into her pouch. Hatching takes place after 10 days; the young echidna then sucks milk from the pores of the two milk patches (monotremes have no nipples) and remains in the pouch for 45 to 55 days, at which time it starts to develop spines. The mother digs a nursery burrow and deposits the young, returning every five days to suckle it until it is weaned at seven months.

Here endeth the lesson.

Now I am back in the cosy confines of my suburban retreat, again close to shopping centres, cinema multiplexes, fast food franchises, and within easy walking distance of cafés, coffee shops, and freshly baked muffins. As good as it was to spend two weeks in a rural setting, I am happy to be back in the burbs writing this. Don’t get me wrong, I am also more than happy to return to Mt. Crawford to house sit again―but only when the weather is another twenty degrees warmer.

TED on Tuesday: The Dawn Of De-Extinction

Famous last words, perhaps? Click to view full size.

In a previous entry on this blog, I wrote about my visit to the Museum of Natural History in New York City. Part of what I wrote concerned the destruction of the passenger pigeon. Once numbering in the billions, the last surviving member of that species died almost 100 years ago, in 1914. But what if there was a way to bring back the passenger pigeon? Or the woolly mammoth? Or any number of other extinct species?

Incredibly, utilising science, technology and advances in DNA research, scientists are now close to the point where it is possible to bring extinct species back to life. In this TED Talk, Stewart Brand (the Whole Earth Catalog, The WELL, the Global Business Network, the Long Now Foundation, etc), outlines ongoing research and long term plans to de-extinct some of the animals that have disappeared from the planet.

Granted, resurrecting the woolly mammoth using ancient DNA may sound like mad science. But Brand’s Revive and Restore project has an entirely rational goal: to learn what causes extinctions so we can protect currently endangered species, preserve genetic and biological diversity, repair depleted ecosystems, and essentially “undo harm that humans have caused in the past.”

Watch Stuart Brand’s TED Talk now...

Stewart Brand's newest book is Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. He is also the author of How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built.

Friday Photo #13: Moreton Bay Fig

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Rising out of the earth like some type of prehistoric creature, this Moreton Bay Fig tree in one of Sydney’s inner city gardens, serves to remind us of just how transient our lives and years on this planet really are.

Hopefully, long after I have gone, this tree will still be standing here; its massive branches reaching higher into the sky, and its thick green leaves providing even more shade for the people sheltering under its canopy from winter showers and summer heat.

Imagine for a moment, the power it takes to keep those huge branches extended for generations at a time. If one of those branches was to be severed from the trunk, you would need a large team of draft horses to shift it even a few metres, such would be its weight. And yet the tree itself has stood (for who knows how many years), growing ever taller, broader, and more magnificent.

Long may it continue to do so.

Image: Moreton Bay Fig, Sydney

Photographer: Jim Lesses