Wild & Wondrous - Favorite World Press

The FWP weekly digest of wondrous wildlife happenings
and other interesting items from the natural world

Creatures to meet | Things to learn
Things to do

Lisa S. French

It’s Earth Day—We’re All In With Tree-Nation

1.5-minute read

Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.

Rabindranath Tagore

FWP Earth Day Dozen Playlist

If you’re a friend of Favorite World Press, you know we’re tree people. If you’re a first-time visitor—well, hello there, happy to have you—by the way, we’re tree people.

We love trees for their planet-cooling, well-being-enhancing, wildlife-supporting, music-making majesty. And we plant trees and work to protect forests because they provide one of the most effective nature-based solutions to global environmental threats.

Did you know:

31% of the world’s land surface is covered by forests,
33% of the C02 released from burning fossil fuels is absorbed by forests,
75% of the world’s accessible freshwater is provided by forests,
80% of all land-dwelling species rely on forests for their survival,
1.6 billion people rely on forests for food, water, fuel, and jobs,
17% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from deforestation.

Hope for the Planet
Because the world’s forests are major planetary players, they need protection to keep them healthy and intact. But every minute of every day, we’re losing the equivalent of 36 football fields in forest cover. To make up for current levels of annual deforestation, we need to plant an additional 10 billion trees a year.

Planting the right trees in the right place is critical to their survival and reaping their full environmental, social, and economic benefits. That’s why we’re proud to announce that in honor of Earth Day, we’re going global and partnering with the proprietary tree-planting platform Tree-Nation.

As we have for the past three-plus years, FWP will be planting one tree for every print and e-book sold from the Frankie and Peaches: Tales of Total Kindness Series. Through our new partnership with Tree-Nation, we’ll be choosing from 300 different tree species in 39 active reforestation projects in 25 countries on six different continents.

To kick-start our campaign, we’re pitching in on projects in the United States, Brazil, Tanzania, Thailand, India, and Madagascar. Each tree that we plant will be assigned a unique URL so we can track its leafy, green contribution to carbon storage, local communities, and biodiversity—it’s the internet of trees.

See how we grow with Tree-Nation here.

Thank you for helping us help them create a life-sustaining planet.

Wishing you a happy, healthy, hopeful Earth Day!

xo Favorite World Press

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Lisa S. French April 22, 2022

Cherry blossoms blowing in the spring wind

The Earth Laughs In Flowers

2-minute read

That wonderfully evocative quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson serves as a joyful reminder to get out there and cultivate some blooming laughs this spring. In celebration of Earth Month, we’re re-posting our April 2021 blog; it’s chock-full of resources to help you plan and grow a mood-lifting Smile Machine. So dig in and share a bit of green good cheer with people, wildlife, and the planet!

After you’ve planted your patch, if you’re feeling extra motivated, you can earn climate-friendly rewards for giving Mama Earth a boost this month. Check it out!

In the race to protect and restore the rapidly dwindling natural world, we humans occupy the space between hope and healing, and we have the power to make that space both beautiful and life-sustaining. If you are an aspiring citizen conservationist motivated to show our home planet a little love in honor of Earth Month, you may be surprised (and excited!) to learn that one of the most impactful contributions that you can make to support nature is to turn your backyard into a haven for wildlife. By tending to your outdoor patch in a way that increases native species, contributing to both biodiversity and your local green infrastructure, you can help to shape healthy, stable ecosystems that support all living beings.

The good news is you don’t need to be an expert in horticulture or wildlife biology to nurture nature and become a champion for green connectivity—the linking of natural areas so that animals can safely move from one place to another. Wherever you are, city or suburb, and whatever the size of your outdoor space, you can create habitat stepping stones for birds, pollinators, and other wild ones. It all comes down to what you grow because what you grow determines which species can live on your patch. By learning which native plants are the best choices to support wildlife, you can help prevent the loss of precious flora and fauna and the resulting disruption of ecosystems. Over the last 50 years, biological diversity has diminished by 68% globally, and 1,000,000 species are currently at risk of extinction. Now, more than ever, it’s all green thumbs on deck.

To guide the transformation of your backyard, patio, or terrace garden into a wildlife-supporting habitat, we’ve pulled together some useful resources to get you growing in April:

Nature’s Best Hope/Douglas W. Tallamy: A New York Times Bestseller, Nature’s Best Hope offers engaging, expert insight into the need for and benefits of backyard conservation, the specialized relationship between plants and animals, as well as an easy-to-follow blueprint for choosing plants that increase biodiversity. It also features helpful FAQs such as why Monarch caterpillars only eat milkweed and why you should care that birds are disappearing—for the bird-indifferent.

The Wildlife Gardener/Kate Bradbury: This photo-filled gardening guide details step-by-step projects to help you bring nature home.

National Wildlife Federation Native Plant Finder: Just enter your North American zip code into this handy tool to find out which plants host the highest number of butterflies, moths, and birds in the place where you live.

National Wildlife Federation Certified Wildlife Habitat Program: If you’ve decided to go all-in, you can have your garden officially certified as a habitat for wildlife. Fill out this application to let NWF know about your sustainable practices and how you provide food, water, cover, and places to raise young.

Audubon Native Plant Finder: The National Audubon Society offers another excellent location-specific planting tool. Enter your zip code into the Native Plant Finder to receive an emailed list of the best plants for your local birds, get tips on how to create a bird-friendly habitat, and track your contribution to Audubon’s goal of planting 1 million native plants for feathered friends.

Monarch Watch: A non-profit conservation, education and research organization dedicated to the preservation of the Monarch butterfly, Monarch Watch offers free milkweed plants to create a Monarch waystation, as well as tips on how to grow milkweed and monitor caterpillar growth.

Prairie Moon Nursery: This is one of our favorite native plant nurseries and the largest in the United States. With over 700 plants in stock, if you need it, they probably have it, including keystone plants like asters, milkweed, goldenrod, and sunflowers to get you started. And they are staffed by lovely, knowledgeable people to boot!

We hope that you’re feeling at least a bit inspired to dig in and explore ways that you can participate in the backyard biodiversity movement. By pitching in to nurture rather than diminish nature, we can help keep the planet that we depend on for survival functioning in top form, and that’s a wonderful and necessary thing. Grow native and they will come!

Happy gardening! Wishing every bunny a peaceful holiday!

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Lisa S. French April 15, 2022

Manatees Say What?

1.5-minute read

You might not think that manatees would be a particularly talkative bunch, but according to new research from Florida Atlantic University, the beloved, roly-poly sea mammals have something to say and produce five different, surprisingly high-pitched sounds to say it. Despite their considerable heft, you won’t hear any deep bass bellowing from these gentle giants. Manatee-speak sounds a bit like mouse squeaks on steroids. Have a listen here.

Like other marine animals, how manatees communicate depends on what they are up to in their underwater world. Much the same way the tone of a human voice helps to convey mood, manatee calls provide insight into the motivation and emotional state of the aquatic critters.

So, what is on the minds of manatees as they propel themselves around the shallow waterways of coastal Florida? Here’s a handy-dandy manatee call decoder based on seven years of recorded vocalizations mapped to different behaviors:

Squeaks:
A squeaking manatee is a stressed-out manatee. Close encounters with nets, fishing gear, and boats don’t make for happy sea cows.

High squeaks:
Manatee moms and calves make sure they are always within squeaking distance of one another. High pitched calls signal a baby on board or a calve separated from its mother.

Squeals:
Frolicking manatees are big squealers. Body surfing, barrel rolls, and follow-the-leader qualify as good manatee fun.

Squeak squeals:
A squeak squeal is the sound of a manatee excited about finding food—an “oh, look, seagrass” super-yay.

Chirps:
After a productive day of manatee-ing, these soothing sounds commonly come from manatees at rest.

And why should we care about sea creature communications? Deciphering manatee vocalizations can help us to understand how they interact with each other and their environment, which is critical to keeping them healthily in the swim.

While scientists continue to study the behavior-related songs of Florida manatees, we suspect that if the iconic animals had something to say to humans, it would be along the lines of: “Do you know what happened to our seagrass?” “We eat the seagrass.” “Perhaps you would be kind enough to get us more of the seagrass?” “We thank you in advance!”

As we wrote in June 2021, Florida manatees have been experiencing massive die-offs due to climate change and pollution-related loss of their primary food source. Unfortunately, restoring the health of seagrass beds is a long-term project. In the meantime, wintering adult manatees need about 230 pounds of leafy greens a day to survive, so in January 2022, federal and state wildlife officials embarked on a direct feeding program to help keep the hungry animals afloat. You can see how manatees in the Indian River Lagoon made 160,000 pounds of lettuce disappear here. The squeaky manatee gets the sea salad!

If you’d like to pitch in to protect manatees, whether you’re a local Floridian or just passing through, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has some good ways to help out here.

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Lisa S. French April 8, 2022

bouquet of blue and yellow tulips on a dark blue background, close-up

We Hold Ukraine In Our Hearts

During the month of April, 100% of the profits from the sales of The Tales of Total Kindness title The Upside Down Boys will be donated to support CARE’s Ukraine Crisis Fund to help provide immediate aid to relieve suffering of displaced people.

From The Upside Down Boys:

“It’s a chain of bad feelings,
that’s as plain as can be.
I will stop this meanness from spreading!
It is my specialty!”

with love,

Favorite World Press

…

Lisa S. French April 1, 2022

Learning the Language of Reconciliation

1.5-minute read

Repairing hurt feelings after a quarrel can be tricky business. Striking the right note to lower the temperature is often a delicate and uncertain undertaking—a challenge that also impacts monkey-to-monkey relations.

While young primates acquire conflict resolution skills during infancy and adolescence, some species are better at peace-making than others. According to a landmark Emory University social study of stump-tailed and rhesus macaques, when it comes to tending to the bruised feelings that occur in day-to-day monkey business, compared to their rhesus cousins, stump-tailed macaques have a real talent for post-dust-up diplomacy.

Although stump-tailed macaques aren’t shy about continuously communicating minor grievances, they’re just as eager to restore peaceful relations within their live-and-let-live social groups. In the rigid hierarchy of rhesus society, where few offenses go unpunished, conflicts are more likely to escalate and less likely to be forgiven or forgotten. In this tale of two types of monkeys, Emory researchers set out to determine if rhesus macaques could learn winning reconciliation skills from their stump-tailed relatives; the answer was a resounding yes!

After five months of living with their amiable stump-tailed tutors, the young rhesus macaques developed less hostile, more forgiving behavior, reconciling in three times as many conflicts. The champion grudge holders learned to sort out their squabbles by engaging in pro-social, patch-up gestures like grooming, play wrestling, happy hooting, and lip-smacking—the macaque equivalent of hugging it out.

Not only were the rhesus monkeys able to learn the language of reconciliation, even after they were separated from their cousins, they reduced their overall aggression towards their troop mates and maintained a genuinely friendly attitude. Exposing the young rhesus macaques to positive social experiences provided the animals with an opportunity to learn a more harmonious way of being in their world, and they decided to stick with it. Wise monkeys!

If you’d like to read more inspiring stories of lessons in loving-kindness from the animal kingdom, we highly recommend The Age of Empathy, by Frans de Waal.

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Lisa S. French March 24, 2022

Remain in Light

“A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period —
When March is scarcely here.”

Emily Dickinson

Today marks the vernal equinox.
The sun will be exactly above the equator.
The darkness will equal the light.
Tomorrow the light wins.
Welcome spring.
Welcome the season of hope and resilience.

…

Lisa S. French March 20, 2022

It’s National Panda Day!

You can find pro-tips on how to pandi-fy your mid-week vibe here.

That’s all for now.

Have a tranquil Wednesday.

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Lisa S. French March 16, 2022

How Green Are Your Genes?

1.5-minute read

Where on Earth do you feel most at home? Are you a card-carrying urbanite, or do you have more of an affinity for big skies, fragrant forests, and babbling brooks? If you feel the most essential you-ness of you in nature, according to a new study, you may have been born that way.

Researchers investigating whether the desire to seek connections with the natural world is partly heritable have found the first evidence of a genetic influence on an individual’s preference for the great out there. A survey of 1153 pairs of identical and fraternal twins between the ages of 19 and 89 revealed that the identical twins shared the same inclination to pursue experiences in nature despite differences in their individual environments. Study participants who were genetically predisposed to get their nature fix were more motivated to make extra efforts to access a park, garden, or nature area.

Love of Nature: Pass It On
Whether through nature or nurture, passing on love for the living world is good for human health. The physical and psychological benefits of spending time in nature are indisputable, including reduced blood pressure and heart rate, and lower levels of anxiety and depression. Because 55% of the world’s population lives in cities with limited exposure to green space, understanding what inspires people to engage with nature is an important factor in creating healthy, urban environments that promote well-being.

Now, thanks to our planting partners at American Forests, it will be easier for city dwellers across the United States to get their fair share of nature benefits through the Tree Equity project, which aims to increase and accelerate the greening of urban areas. With a little help from our friends, Favorite World Press is creating more opportunities for everyone to make nature a part of their daily lives.

If you’d like to learn more about the innate human inclination to connect with the natural world and what it really means to be green, we highly recommend Biophilia by the father of biodiversity, Edward O. Wilson.

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Lisa S. French March 9, 2022

Bring Your Baby Bat to Work

1.5-minute read

Recent advances in technology have enabled us to keep tabs on happenings just about everywhere in the world that we’re not, including hard-to-reach places in nature—like the underbellies of fruit bats, for example. Through high-resolution GPS tracking of the furry fliers, scientists are learning how next-generation tropical fruit pollinators acquire the navigation skills they need to take over the night shift and keep us well-stocked in bananas, mangoes, guavas, and cocoa. And the secret to their successful schooling? Baby fruit bats have a ticket to ride.

Researchers studying how bat pups learn to navigate to and from fruit-bearing trees believe the future pollinators are getting an upside-down, in-flight education from their mothers. Egyptian fruit bats head out of the cave at nightfall with their three to 10-week-old pups in tow and deposit them on drop-off trees while they forage nearby for food. The mom-bats check in with their babies as needed throughout the night and then pick them up and return to the cave before sunrise.

When the pups grew old enough to fly solo, scientists discovered they followed the same routes and roosted in the same trees their mothers had shown them. And if the newly independent bats failed to return to the safety of the cave before daybreak, they could count on their watchful moms to track them down. Even though carrying their babies to and fro while foraging takes more energy, the pollinating parents do the extra work so that pups can increase their odds of survival by observing how, when, and where to get down to bat business. Fruit bat see, fruit bat do.

But Magpies Say No
Conservation scientists have successfully used GPS and drone technologies to track and study the movements of creatures great and small, including whales, wolves, butterflies, and bats. However, because some animals seem to be very protective of their privacy, the information-gathering process doesn’t always go according to plan. As FWP’s favorite cartoonist First Dog on the Moon illustrates, Australian magpies defiantly opt out.

Audubon Photo Contest
A quick reminder that you have until March 9, at 12 p.m. EST to enter your best bird pics in the 2022 Audubon Photography Awards. You can read all about it here. The feathered ones await your winning photographic artistry.

And One More Big Thing
Big Life, one of the most effective conservation organizations in Africa, has released an inspiring short film celebrating their success in combating elephant poaching in Kenya and Tanzania. Please watch it here. And if you’d like to explore the stunning photography of Big Life co-founder Nick Brandt, we highly recommend his latest book, The Day May Break.

Because of the everything of everything else going on, if you’re in need of a video of a rescued baby bat enthusiastically enjoying fruit, you can find one here. They like making fruit, and they like eating fruit.

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Lisa S. French February 27, 2022