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

1.5-minute read

What if New York City, the most densely populated urban area in the United States, could be transformed into a green oasis that’s also a haven for winged wildlife? Can we make more room for nature, so the city is less concrete and more jungle? You bet—think vertical!

There are roughly 36,700 acres of handily sun-facing rooftops in NYC—equivalent to 27,803 football fields or 44 Central Parks. That’s a whole lot of valuable space to create healthy, productive habitat for plants, pollinators, and feathered friends—sky meadows teeming with life—wildflowers, songbirds, butterflies, bees. Greening rooftops would not only make the city a force for nature restoration but would help to preserve wildlife in non-urban areas as well. Connecting fragments of habitat would provide migrating and breeding birds with access to life-sustaining vegetation and food resources where and when they’re needed most.

Researchers from Fordham University investigating the potential for NYC green roofs to attract semi-urban and non-urban birds compared avian visitors to green and conventional roofs in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx during spring migration and summer breeding seasons. They found that birds that typically avoid the Big Apple will make an exception for green roofs that provide the right combination of plants and insects for foraging.

With rapid urbanization and loss of green space, most migratory birds will encounter cityscapes in their travels. Providing rooftop recharging stations planted with bird and insect-friendly vegetation will help increase their odds of survival in a warming world. And green roofs aren’t just for the birds—they also benefit people by cleaning and cooling the air, decreasing noise, and reducing storm runoff. Plus, they’re more lovely to look at. Now that’s a sweet city!

You can check out some inspiring examples of NYC green roofs here and global living architecture projects here. And if you’d like to learn more about what it takes to turn regular old urban rooftops into beautiful life-sustaining habitats, watch this video from NYC Audubon.

Whether you’re urban or rural or somewhere in-between, if you’ve been topping up the winter chow to help out hungry local birds, you can get the inside scoop on the pecking order at the feeder and who comes out on top from Audubon. Here in Manhattan, it’s the doves—always the doves. Update: Be sure to have a look at Carla Rhodes’ wonderful snaps of New York birds getting their fair share—doves on cleanup crew.

Speaking of local birds, congratulations to the 2021 MLS Cup Champions—the New York City FC, aka the Pigeons. Well done and welcome back to your urban habitat!

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Lisa S. French December 14, 2021

The Big Benefits of the Big Love of Bison

1.5-minute read

Do you have a favorite nature spot where you go to feel all of the good feelings—joy, hope, optimism, comfort? Whether your outdoor sanctuary is a lofty mountain peak, a pristine stretch of beach, an enchanted forest, or a wide-open prairie, connecting to nature is broadly acknowledged to improve human well-being. Interestingly, the mood-enhancing benefits of time spent in nature also benefit nature. How so? Well, according to biologists at Colorado State University, the positive emotions that we associate with a specific soul-soothing place on the planet also aid conservation by increasing our inclination to keep the great out there intact. And what is one of the best ways to amplify emotional connections to a particular landscape? Add wildlife.

To better understand what motivates people to care about preserving the natural world, researchers set out to determine if the reintroduction of bison to the Colorado prairie after a 150-year absence would increase visitor attachment to the North American grasslands—one of the most threatened ecosystems in the world. In the 18th century, bison, the largest mammals in North America, roamed grasslands in the tens of millions. By 1889, only 541 remained. Thanks to ongoing restoration efforts, today, there are around 20,000 of the hefty grazers in parks and reserves in the United States and Canada.

So do these iconic animals have a role to play in connecting people to nature and conservation? How do humans feel about bison, anyway? As it turns out, pretty darn good! Surveying visitors to the Soapstone Prairie Natural Area in Fort Collins, Colorado, before and two years after the reintroduction of a herd of bison, researchers measured a significant increase in how attached people felt to the conservation area. Soapstone Prairie visitors felt more at home, wanted to visit the area more and a resounding 95% felt that it was more important to protect the space after the high plains drifters returned to their historical home on the range. Bringing back bison had an immediate positive impact on people feeling a connection to conservation. We want to protect what we love, and if the experience of visitors to Soapstone is anything to go by, to know bison is to love them. And that’s good news for the preservation of our grasslands and native wildlife.

If you’d like to experience those big bison feelings for yourself, and you’re up for a winter road trip, you can find a list of all of the places they roam here.

And if you’d like to learn more about ongoing bison restoration projects across the rolling plains, visit American Prairie.

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Lisa S. French December 3, 2021

Giving Thanks for the Planet Appreciators

In this season of giving, we want to extend our heartfelt gratitude to our tree-planting readers.

Every single tree that we plant with your support is the start of a forest. A forest that will help to clean the air, cool the planet, purify water, and provide food and shelter for wildlife.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for caring. You are so welcome here!

Wishing You

a Beary

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Lisa S. French November 24, 2021

The Planet Cooling Power of Whale Poop

1.5-minute read

In nature we never see anything isolated,
but everything in connection with something else
which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Sometimes, solutions to our most complex problems come from unexpected places. Could the restoration of great whale populations help us to combat climate change?

If left to its own devices, nature has a tremendous capacity to heal itself and protect us from the harmful impacts of a rapidly warming world. When we maintain greenhouse gas emissions at people- and planet-friendly levels, Earth systems can absorb enough GHG’s to keep global heating in check. Currently, about 25% of the CO₂ emissions that contribute to global heating are absorbed by oceans. Most of the carbon dioxide in oceans is consumed by microscopic algae called phytoplankton. Like trees, the tiny green plants utilize CO₂ for growth. Globally, phytoplankton absorb as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as tropical rainforests. Similar to the effects of deforestation, a reduction in phytoplankton can lead to more GHG emissions in the atmosphere and more heating. That’s where whales come in, or more specifically, the poop of whales.

According to scientists at the University of Tasmania, great whales have a big role to play in helping to cool the planet by dispensing the iron that carbon-absorbing phytoplankton need to grow. Adult whales in the Southern Ocean can eat two tons of iron-rich krill a day—that’s about 40 million mini-crustaceans. Because what goes in must come out, the krill consumed by whales converts to a whole lot of iron-infused phytoplankton fertilizer. By recycling an essential nutrient at a concentration ten million times higher than occurs in seawater, whales contribute to the continued functioning of one of Earth’s most important carbon sinks. The Tasmanian researchers estimate that a 12,000-strong population of iron-excreting sperm whales could stimulate the growth of enough phytoplankton to remove 200,000 tons of carbon annually—the CO₂ equivalent of 17,000 cars traveling 9,320 miles a year.

Marine biologists believe that tens of millions of whales were removed from oceans in the thousand years of active whaling prior to the international moratorium in 1982; this estimated 90% decline in the planet’s largest inhabitants has likely altered the functioning of marine ecosystems. As if we need another good reason to keep on saving the whales other than their all-around awesomeness, protecting and restoring populations of the colossal animals will help maintain healthy oceans that continue to absorb GHG emissions and reduce global heating. A win for the super-poopers is a win for people and the planet.

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Lisa S. French November 20, 2021

Aerial view of blue lake and green forests on a sunny summer day in Finland. Drone photography

Tons of Trees and Tiny Bats

1.5-minute read

Forest Protection – That’s A Yes
Here’s a quick update on forest conservation commitments from the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference:

To prevent the planet from warming beyond 1.5℃, we must reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions by 50% in the next eight years. Planting trees and keeping carbon-absorbing forests intact is an important component of this monumental but achievable mission.

Every six seconds, we’re losing a football pitch of tropical rainforest to deforestation. Millions of acres of forest in northern regions are also being lost to drought, pests, and wildfires worsened by climate change.

Aiming to avert catastrophic heating, last week, international delegates in Glasgow made some progress on the forest protection front. In a strong show of support for the future of the planet, 110 world leaders pledged to end deforestation by 2030, restore damaged land, develop sustainable agriculture for rural communities, and reaffirm financial commitments to Indigenous and local communities. The combined pledges account for 85% of the world’s forests.

To ensure that COP26 signatories walk the walk and deliver on commitments, real-time global satellite monitoring of forests will be critical. You can find out how eyes in the sky are helping to keep tabs on trees from Global Forest Watch.

The Best Bird is a Bat
And in case you missed it, the Forest & Bird numero uno, all-around champion, New Zealand Bird of the Year is—wait for it, a bat. The 2021 winner is the pekapeka-tua-roa, a.k.a. the long-tailed bat, one of the rarest bats in the world and one of only two mammals native to the island country. In an upset victory, the thumb-sized, furry night-flyer edged out 76 amazing birds to capture the crown.

The forest-dwelling micro-bat roosts in trunks and large limbs of trees in colonies of hundreds to thousands. As a result of introduced predators and deforestation, the bug-munching pekapeka is now in serious trouble. Because a bat’s gotta hang, and with only 14% of New Zealand’s indigenous forests remaining, conservationists are working to increase the number of potential roosting sites by preserving habitat, so the stretchy-winged wonder has a fighting chance at survival.

Although we apparently have a faulty bird chooser, as we’re zero for two with our 2021 Bird of the Year predictions, we’re always happy to celebrate the recognition of any precious creature in need of TLC (tender loving conservation). Congratulations little pekapeka, this year you’re batting 1000%!

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Lisa S. French November 10, 2021

COP26: Yes is this present sun

Dear Earth,

When many individual good things coalesce to create one great good thing, keeping you healthy and functioning, that’s a true and necessary thing.

Thinking of you during one of the most extraordinarily challenging times in your life history—ever hopeful for the recognition of the transformational power of many good things.

With love and gratitude for all that you do,

LSF • WW • FWP

After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.

Wallace Stevens

COP26

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Lisa S. French October 30, 2021

Back in Black—and Orange: California Monarchs

1-minute read

If you’re in need of some good news this week, we’re happy to oblige with a hopeful update from the Pacific Grove monarch butterfly sanctuary in Northern California. Since the 1980s, the number of monarchs west of the Rockies has dropped by an alarming 99%. In 2019, as reported by the Washington Post, there were zero sightings at the sanctuary. Zero. This year, observers counted 2,500 monarchs in the pollinator’s Pacific Grove migratory rest stop. That’s good news, indeed!

While the 2021 sightings aren’t a guarantee of more monarchs to come, taking action to make the planet more hospitable for butterflies by increasing pollinator habitat, reducing pesticide use, and combating climate change will improve the odds of long-term recovery. If you’d like to help ensure that monarch butterflies east or west are back to stay, here are some make-it-better organizations offering handy tools to enable you to lend a hand with monitoring and mapping the migration of the winged beauties across the United States:

And if you’d like to attract monarchs as well as other pollinators to your personal patch, we’re firm believers in the plant-it-and-they-will-come paradigm. You can find useful info on how to garden to increase biodiversity by cultivating habitats in your backyard, front yard, side yard, or window box here. Because whatever else is going on in the world, and something’s always going on, it’s better with butterflies. Just ask our in-house butterfly gardeners, Frankie and Peaches.

To encourage budding young pollinator gardeners in your school or neighborhood, you can order milkweed seeds from Save Our Monarchs to hand out as a special butterfly-saving treat this spooky season and year-round. Wishing you a happily hair-raising Halloween!

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Lisa S. French October 23, 2021

Where, Oh Where Are The Walruses?

1-minute read

The monitoring of wildlife, habitats, and ecosystems is critical to conservation. But keeping tabs on what’s happening in the natural world—changes in the number of different species and populations of specific species, and how they move and interact with the environment across millions of square miles of land and sea—is no simple task. Now, thanks to advances in conservation technology, tracking endangered, elusive, and widely dispersed animals is getting a whole lot easier. Scientists are employing a diverse range of tech tools, including radar, sonar, motion sensors, camera traps, drones, smartphones, and satellites, to gather information that will aid in the development of nature-saving strategies. One of the greatest remaining challenges is deciphering all of that captured data. That’s where citizen scientists come in.

Walrus Headcount
To amplify global conservation efforts, researchers are asking all of you wildlife watchers out there to pitch in with planetary health checks by keeping a lookout and sharing what you see. One of the crowdsourced projects taking place right now is Walrus from Space, the Atlantic and Laptev walrus census. The World Wildlife Fund and the British Antarctic Survey hope to enlist half a million people over the next four years to contribute to the counting of walruses by searching for the tusked creatures in satellite images. This sea mammal census aims to determine how environmental changes, like global heating, impact the walrus populations of Canada, Norway, Greenland, and Russia.

Do you have an eagle eye—or two? Do you know a walrus when you see one? Although an adult walrus can weigh as much as a Mazda Miata—about 2,200 pounds—pinpointing the massive sea creatures in the vast expanse of Arctic waters is trickier than you might imagine. Are you up for the challenge? Become a walrus detective and put your keen sight to the test. Register with the WWF here to see what you can see—in the sea—and help to secure the future of these iconic marine animals.

More People-Powered Projects
If you’d like to explore more ways to connect with the conservation community to share your observations of our planet’s flora and fauna, check out these “I spy” projects:

Bird Alert
Before we go, a quick heads up that polling is now open for New Zealand’s Bird of the Year. Exciting! Get to know the 2021 contestants and cast your votes! We think all of the birds are winners, but we’re going to go out on a limb and predict that the rockhopper penguin will be this year’s it bird. The endangered little rock climber most definitely looks like a champion.

Turtle Tsunami
Oh, and one more helping nature heal, turtle-y amazing conservation item: news of an extraordinary mass hatching event. Thanks to the successful monitoring and management of giant South American river turtles by the World Conservation Society Brasil, tens of thousands of the little shelled critters made their way to the water world they’ll call home. Behold the turtle tsunami!

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Lisa S. French October 17, 2021

A family of Superb Fairy-wrens in South Eastern New South Wales, Australia; brilliant blue and black father and cute brown chicks on a branch with leafy green background

Bestest Australian Bird: The Superb Fairy-Wren

1.5-minute read

Australia is home to some of the world’s most remarkable birds—brolgas, galahs, rosellas, currawongs—to name a splendid few. According to BirdLife International’s State of the World’s Birds report, like many species globally, Australia’s birds are threatened by the ongoing environmental stressors of habitat loss and climate change. For the past two weeks, to help raise awareness of the need to protect the island continent’s diverse avian wildlife, friends of the feathered cast their votes for the top-of-the-tree, best-in-beaks Bird of the Year.

The 2021 all-around favorite, announced on October 8, was the superb fairy-wren, a passerine, aka perching bird, that inhabits backyards and woodlands across eastern Australia and Tasmania. Although the fairy-wren edged out our preferred pick, the tawny frogmouth, by a chin feather, we can appreciate the songbird’s many winning attributes. For starters, it’s hard not to be positively inclined toward a creature called “superb”. In addition to their esteem-enhancing moniker, the dainty songsters have other champion qualities:

It takes a bird village:
Superb fairy-wrens raise their young in cooperative social groups. One to four male helpers support nesting parents by contributing to the defense and feeding of hatchlings.

Winged chameleons:
During mating season, the plumage of the male superb fairy-wren changes from a muddy brown to a striking shade of blue. While female fairy-wrens prefer the males that turn blue first and stay blue the longest, when it comes to life expectancy, changing colors puts male birds at a competitive disadvantage because that vibrant hue also attracts predators. As a result, according to researchers at Monash University, male fairy-wrens in blue mode have learned to be super cautious. Compared to their brown flock mates, they spend more time foraging for food in hiding and they’re the first birds out of the bush in response to alarm calls—file those adaptive risk avoidance skills under survival of the bluest.

The littlest birds sing the prettiest songs:
In the avian world, males commonly sing more frequently and produce more complex songs to attract mates. However, superb fairy-wrens are equal opportunity vocalists. Both males and females sing solo year-round and tutor their sons and daughters in familial trills, twitters, and tweets. Have a listen.

And with those songbird snippets, we wrap up the 2021 Australian Bird Of The Year competition. To celebrate all of this year’s contestants, author and illustrator Georgia Angus has created a downloadable poster for your viewing pleasure. It’s free, it’s beautiful, and you can get it here. A hearty congratulations to the superb fairy-wren! Don’t despair, tawny frogmouth—you’ll get another chance to strut your feathered stuff in 2022.

Just a reminder: the southern hemisphere’s best-in-bird competitions continue with Forest & Bird’s New Zealand Bird of the Year, from October 18 through October 31. At the moment, we’re leaning toward the rockhopper penguin, but the royal spoonbill is pretty darn hard to resist. Hmm, and what about the southern brown kiwi… It’s a veritable bird watchers paradise down there!

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Lisa S. French October 9, 2021

Sights, Sounds, and Sorrows

1.5-minute read

American Forests Has a Brand New Tree
The needs of the social and environmental movements are ever-changing, and our tree-planting partner, American Forests, is evolving to meet the transcendent challenges of a world in flux. They’ve unveiled a new logo representing their critical work protecting and regenerating forests to slow climate change and advance social equity for you—for your health, your safety, your right to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and enjoy nature in all its glory. To lead the charge, American Forests’ mission is rooted in unity, hope, growth, and progress. Yeah, we’re on board with that!

Holy Salmon Supper! It’s Fat Bear Week
The brown fisher bears of Katmai National Park are doubling down on the all-you-can-eat salmon buffet this week in preparation for their long winter’s nap. It’s time to get to know the chomp-happy contenders and place your bets on the bear most likely to achieve maximum pre-hibernation plump-i-tude. You can follow their fish acquisition progress live, courtesy of the Explore.org bear cams. Btw, our money is on protective mama bear, Grazer—she’s got a salmon-conquering look about her.

Bear Weight Update – Oct. 5: The winner of the Fat Bear Week 2021 salmon scarfing contest is four-time champion, Otis. The quarter-century-old king of the catch may be less spry than some of his younger competitors, but what he lacks in speed, he makes up for in strategy. How Otis abides: Be one with the water and let the fish come to you. Congratulations, big fella—sleep well!

Gorillas, Fireflies, Wildebeests, Oh, My!
The Nature Conservancy has announced the winners of the 2021 Global Photo Contest, and they’re brilliant. You can explore the striking images of some of the most precious inhabitants, and awe-inspiring aspects of our planet right here.

Música Natura Sonora
Shika Shika, the global artists collective, is back with a new album that pays homage to the “immensity, beauty, and mystery” of the natural world. Have a listen to the Latin American rhythms of Natura Sonora by El Búho. And be sure to keep your eyes peeled and ears open for A Guide to the Birdsong of Western Africa coming in 2022.

The Songs of City Crickets
We decided to do a little Earth-music sampling of our own, but where to go for nature sounds in NYC? We were pleased to discover that you can actually hear courtyard crickets in the city that never sleeps—from honk, honk, honk to chirp, chirp, chirp. Aah—the sweet songs of New York bugs! If you can make nature music here, you can make it anywhere.

Ivory-Billed Woodpecker: Officially Gone Forever
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service made a particularly sorrowful announcement this week—the proposed addition of 23 American animals and plants to the growing list of extinct species, the largest group added to that category since the inception of the Endangered Species Act in 1973.

One of the most lamentable losses was the Ivory-billed woodpecker. Although scientists held out hope that the elusive bird, which had not been seen for over 70 years, had managed to survive in hiding, it has officially been determined that America’s largest woodpecker, dubbed the “Lord God Bird,” has disappeared from the planet. There is no greater grief-inducing declaration in the natural world than gone forever. Farewell, beautiful one—we’re sorry that we failed you.

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Lisa S. French October 1, 2021