Video: Following the Ichetucknee

Following on the heels of my last post about fond memories floating and swimming in the Ichetucknee River, an old hometown friend sent me this video to share. He produced it to show the holistic and interconnected nature of urban runoff and how pollution ends up in Florida’s numerous creeks, sinks, streams, and rivers. Groundwater flows from place to place as sheetflow and percolates through topsoil here, but once it penetrates down far enough it reaches an immense undergound limestone aquifer. The aquifer links countless waterways (which can appear as either separate or connected on a map). For pollution, accessing the aquifer is akin to taking the subway– or a bullet train — across town.

(Review) The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian’s Hunt for Sustenance, by Tovar Cerulli

Where’s the groundhog?

Twenty-three years ago, I ceased eating meat. Over time, I’ve gone through incarnations of eating seafood and not eating seafood (currently it’s on the menu); but I freely admit that I’ve never given as much thought to the why of my pisco-lacto-vegetarianism as has the gifted writer, (and thoughtful eater), Tovar Cerulli.

In The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian’s Hunt for Sustenance (Pegasus Books, 2012), Cerulli beautifully chronicles his philosophical approach to eating and living. The book follows his journey from eschewing not only flesh but all animal products—such as milk and honey—to becoming, improbably, a hunter of deer in New England’s woods.

Rest assured, his journey is far from a navel-gazing or vain adventure. In his writing, Cerulli interweaves literary influences and meditations that span from Buddhism to animal-rights ethics to farming to hunting. It’s an approach that augments the threads of his personal life narrative with a broader connection to the link between the ethics of how animals (both wild and domestic) are treated in our normal channels of food production—even the organic farming of vegetables.

The vast array of sources Cerulli draws upon reveal his deep interest in pursuing “mindful” eating, and exposes his driving mission to seek out the “right” way to live. I interpreted this “right path,” in his view, to be one of minimal impact to the natural world, but also one that yields a healthy diet and a deep personal connection to food and how it is produced.

One of the things I most appreciated about Cerulli’s book is the honesty he demonstrates in anecdote after anecdote when explaining how his thoughts and attitudes toward food, and animals in particular, have changed over time.

Cool future for brook trout, even in era of climate change

Eastern brook trout, photo from Trout Unlimited

This article first appeared in the Charlotte Observer on Feb. 27, 2012.

A spot of good news is surfacing for North Carolina’s brook trout, and the anglers who hold their speckled brookies so dear.

Not so long ago, scientists forecast that much of what remained of eastern brook trout habitat would be severely affected by climate change. In fact, it was thought the only native trout in the Eastern United States might vanish from large parts of its southern range, leaving only a few populations concentrated mostly in western North Carolina.

But a new study in progress across seven Southeastern states has found reason to believe that many cold-water streams – those found at elevations where brook trout love to linger – may be less vulnerable to warming temperatures than previously forecast.

The study’s investigator, Andrew Dolloff, is team leader for the cold-water fisheries research unit of the Forest Service’s Southern Research Station in Blacksburg, Va. Brook trout are very sensitive to water temperatures, preferring to live in the cleanest cold water streams below a critical threshold of 69.8 degrees.

“They can survive above this threshold, but making a living is much, much more difficult for them,” Dolloff said.

Brook trout are also one of the most widely spread temperature-sensitive aquatic species in the East. This makes them good indicators for understanding the effects of climate change. “If a trout can’t live somewhere anymore, there’s going to be a whole bunch of other species that can’t live there either,” Dolloff said.

Brookie background

In 2006, Trout Unlimited released a report that showed a 20 percent reduction in the historic range of brook trout. Trout Unlimited is a not-for-profit organization which protects, conserves and works to restore cold-water streams and rivers in North America. The report also showed that brookies were greatly reduced in an additional 47 percent of their historic range. This led some to question what the future might hold, given predictions of a warming world.

An answer to this question came about, also in 2006, when scientists attempted to scale down findings from a continental-scale model of climate change. The model assumed a correlation between water and air temperatures of about 0.8 degrees. This meant that for every one-degree change in air temperature, they modeled a 0.8-degree change in water temperature.

Most climate-change models predict about a four degree increase in air temperature in the next 100 years, so the study predicted a corresponding 3.2 degree increase in cold-water stream temperatures over the same period. This resulted in a dire forecast that the brook trout’s remaining habitat would contract radically, leaving intact less than half of the habitat that remained.

“It caused a lot of consternation, and rightly so,” Dolloff said.

Road salt’s second sting

This is an article I wrote that published in the Charlotte Observer and Raleigh News & Observer’s Sci-Tech pages on Nov. 14, 2011. 

Marbled salamander, photo courtesy of Jim Petranka.

A sure sign that winter has arrived is when drivers spot chunks of road salt in their lanes. It’s safe to say drivers appreciate ice-free roads, but … ever wonder where all that salt ends up?

In North Carolina, the Department of Transportation spreads, on average, 256,249,901 pounds of salt on state-managed roads each year.

UNC Asheville biologist James Petranka decided to investigate what this seasonal onslaught means for our native amphibians. Because amphibians breathe through their skin and are highly susceptible to environmental contaminants, Petranka wondered if flushes of road salts to their breeding ponds kill them.

The salt, he learned, didn’t kill the amphibians outright, though it does harm their growth as juveniles. Perhaps more alarming, he found the road salt is causing problems in the food web.

Mimicking nature

The effect of road salts on lakes and streams is documented, but it’s understudied in pools that form seasonally, and seasonal pools are where amphibians prefer to breed in late winter and early spring. After reading a scientific report on road salt effects upon wood frogs and spotted salamanders in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, Petranka couldn’t get his mind off what might be unfolding in the mountainous woods of Western North Carolina that surround his office.

Conserving the Everglades headwaters

A friend and colleague of mine is using his photographic and visual story-telling skills to help communicate the importance of Florida’s ranching heritage within the perspective of conservation. The video below is a taste of a larger project he’s working on with many others to conserve 150,000 acres of headwaters to the Everglades, and the ranchlands within them. The safeguarded area would create the Everglades Headwaters National Wildlife Refuge and Conservation Area. This is a unique project being pushed by some in Florida for the Fish and Wildlife Service to acquire the development rights of large ranches and other lands, while allowing the ranch owners and landowners to continue their traditional ranching or agricultural practices. By placing these lands in conservation easements, the Everglades Headwaters will be protected from further development too. (And in a state known for selling off its natural assets, this is a big deal.) These ranches aren’t used only by people and cattle — wildlife flock to them too.

My friend, photographer Carlton Ward, has been experimenting with camera traps on many of these ranches for the past few years. The result has been a series of fabulous photos of rare Florida panthers, large black bears and their cubs, bobcats and foxes. These critters travel across the ranchlands and use them as both home and a wildlife corridor. An amazing camera trap photo of Carlton’s, of a black bear exhaling a fine mist in a cool dawn, graced the cover of Audubon magazine this month, and more were printed within.

Watch this video for more information on the proposed Everglades Headwaters National Wildlife Refuge and Conservation Area. To see the Florida panther photo, and to learn more details, read this in-depth op/ed Carlton wrote for the St. Petersburg Times. More information and videos are available at NorthernEverglades.com.

(Review) Shell Games, by Craig Welch

 

Cover of Shell Games, by Craig Welch

Shell Games, by Craig Welch, is hands-down one of the most interesting wildlife stories I’ve read in decades. (Admittedly, the subtitle, Rogues, Smugglers, and the Hunt for Nature’s Bounty, snookered me from the outset.) Welch is an environmental writer at the Seattle Times, and the book grew from stories he first reported for his newspaper about wildlife trafficking in the Puget Sound. The more he looked into it, the more convoluted the tales became. The result is Shell Games, a story of the shellfish industry in the Pacific Northwest, how it went horribly wrong, and the crazy, greedy characters that sped it on the path to illicit international markets.

The shellfish in question is a long-lived clam called a geoduck. They are the antithesis of the big, fuzzy charismatic megafauna that so many wildlife stories depend upon to generate interest. Geoducks are large burrowing clams that live immersed in mud on the ocean floor for decades, with only a fleshy siphon thrust up through the sediment. Through their long-necked siphon, they feed, defecate and expel gametes. They live up to a century and a half, all within their ocean floor burrow. So, why on earth should we care about a long-lived, sedentary clam that weighs a couple of pounds (whoppers weigh up to 15) and garners $6 to $12 per pound of its flesh?

How about, because they are dug up illegally by the thousands and smuggled out of the country to Asian markets — and because competition for them is so fierce that fishermen literally blow up each other’s boats, smugglers inform on their biggest competitors, and the industry garners millions and millions of black-market dollars. Criminal rings form to harvest these shellfish at night, with divers sucking air from secret lines drilled through the hull of ships to maintain clandestine secrecy. Some bandits even use re-breathers so that their illegal harvests can’t be detected by tell-tale bubbles at the surface. All this so that tasty geoduck can be served night after night in seafood restaurants, at home and abroad. Now that is pretty interesting!

Pics of the Day: 47-49; Spring’s arrival

The vernal equinox was on March 20, and I think our cherry trees knew. The day before, their buds burst. It was only a light smattering of flowers in their lower branches at first. Then on Sunday, most of the buds except the ones at the crown popped open. Last night, the last of the crown buds transformed into beautiful blush-white blooms. I snapped these pictures yesterday (before the crown buds burst) and noticed a few dozen bees alighting on the flowers to gather pollen. Today, when I stood beneath the trees, I heard the droning “Zzzzzzz zzzzz zzzzzz,” of what must be a hundred bees visiting our earliest spring-time blooms. None of the trees in our yard except the evergreens have any leaves yet, but I did spy a few with binoculars that are unfurling at the crown of one of our poplar trees. And the goldfinches that visit our seed feeder are in the process of molting their beige feathers for the brilliant golden ones that give them their name. Just when I thought I couldn’t stand one more morning of frost and chill, spring is finally here!

{Pic-47}: A bee visits one of the cherry blossoms in our yard.

{Pic-48}: Waking up to these blooms bursting open was quite a sight for my winter-weary eyes.

{Pic-49}: Three large cherry trees line our driveway.

Saving Ethiopia’s “Church Forests”

Aerial view of a church forest, also called coptic forest, in Ethiopia. (Google Earth)

An article I researched and wrote for the PLoS Blogs network about Ethiopia’s coptic forests published a few days ago. It starts like this:

In America, some fundamental Christians believe that man has a God-given right to use the earth and all its resources to meet their needs. After all, Genesis says so. But across the Atlantic, a different attitude prevails among followers in Ethiopia, which has the longest continuous tradition of Christianity of any African country. Followers of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Churches believe they should maintain a home for all of God’s creatures around their places of worship. The result? Forests ringing churches.

Read the whole piece here.

Mercurial love: mercury pollution turns white ibises “gay.” Or maybe just confused.

A white ibis in Florida, by Terry Walker (Wiki Commons)

Between planning our impending move to Asheville in January, traveling to Minnesota for the Holidays, plowing through some freelance assignments that all rolled in at the same time, wrapping up the Blog Column of the Week for 2010, and working on my book (ha! supposedly…), blogging has gotten a bit lost in my daily fray. I miss cyber musings! The worst part about being too busy to breathe is that that’s when I seem to notice all these great blog post ideas floating around.

One such idea that popped up in my email inbox last week was a press release about a University of Florida experimental study examining the effect of mercury on white ibises.* These birds, if you are unfamiliar, are gorgeous. Nothing screams Florida! to me than seeing a flock of these snow-white birds careen overhead with their curved fleshy-pink beaks silhouetted in the orange dawn light. Settlers to southern Florida in the olden days referred to them as Swamp Chickens because they lived in the swamps and, well, they supposedly taste like chicken. The juveniles and first-year birds are a splotchy mess of brown and white feathers, but the adult are pure white with a curved, salmon pink bill. They use this bill when they wade in the shallows of lakes and swamps where they probe the mud for little reptiles, amphibians and fish. In breeding season, the males develop dark black tips on their wing that read like a personal ad: I iz reddy, chiks!

So it was with a little dismay that I learned UF researchers had found that exposing white ibis males to experimental levels of mercury causes hormonal shifts that spurs them to try mating with other males. The Miami Herald seized on this to say that mercury makes ibises gay, and National Geographic was not far behind. Let’s face it, the media loves gay animal stories.

So what was really going on?

It turns out the scientists were interested in learning whether mercury pollution in the wild affected white ibis reproduction or chick development. Mercury pollution was a problem historically in southern Florida. (Is it still? Anyone know?)  A press release says: “The contaminant found its way into the Everglades via municipal and medical waste incineration, but during the 1990s, medical waste became more closely regulated and flashlight batteries that didn’t contain mercury replaced those that did.” So we can deduce from this that from the mid-1990s till now, supposedly mercury pollution has been lessening. (Someone holler out if they know it’s worsened.)

(Review) The Golden Spruce, by John Vaillant

The Golden Spruce, cover; by John Vaillant. (W.W. Norton & Co.)

In 1997, a symbolic Sitka spruce tree known as the golden spruce was cut down illegally in the dark cover of night. The deed took place in British Columbia when a marginally-employed logger and layout engineer, Grant Hadwin, systematically sawed the 300-year-old tree so that it was left teetering without the strength to withstand a strong wind. A day later, the massive giant crashed down. In Hadwin’s mind, the act was a political statement against the greed and short-sightedness of industrial logging corporations. But to many, his actions were environmental terrorism.

The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed is a non-fiction nature book that systematically investigates the meaning behind the golden spruce tree to three main groups of people, and the motives that lay within the man who actually felled it. This book is part mystery, part natural history, part ethnography and shot through with excellent narrative storytelling.

Author John Vaillant has a way of gathering fact after fact like so many vibrant colored strings and then weaving them into a multi-colored and multi-dimensional tapestry. The book’s structure is an investigation of various people groups and their attitudes toward using natural resources: the early sea-faring westerners that came to British Columbia for the sea otter fur trade, then stayed for the seemingly limitless timber; the Haida indigenous people that happily sold the otters and timber in their territory; and the loggers that happily plundered the old-growth forests, convinced that it would regrow by the time they were done and that they could cut it all over again. The picture that emerges from this is a detective’s tale that presents the facts of a case as well as how these facts were perceived by the various people groups involved. It is this latter part that infuses Vaillant’s work with a deep literary value.