If you take an interest in birds, then you must take an interest in their habitat—the world in which they live—and if you do that then you have assumed a curiosity and concern about the wider environment. To be interested in the environment is to be interested in our own habitat, and once that holds your attention, you have become interested in the future. You have become interested in life itself. Birds, for me, have confirmed that ours is a life worth living.

~ Niall Edworthy

If he could have contented himself with his artistic triumphs — “Conquerers of the Trail” at the Hotel Monticello, the Venetian panels in the Liberty Theatre — then his fading image as the Nature Man might not have mattered as much. But it is apparent from Knowles’s writing that for him the wilderness, and his own part in it, was paramount.

But to succeed as a nature writer, Knowles would probably have had to get a bit more of the poetry of the woods into his work. The naturalists whose work resonated with the public — Thoreau, John Muir, John Burroughs, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson later on — all wrote beautifully, and captured a bit of the transcendent in their work. Knowles was impatient with the majesty of the silent forest; he wanted to skip to the particulars. Rather than contemplate the grand designs in the animal kingdom, he chose to chronicle individual animal behavior. That’s valuable, too, of course, but Knowles would get so caught up in his observations that he’d lose the thread of the story.

~ Jim Motavalli

~ Robert Voit (via wood s lot)

Might I suggest a collaboration? (via 10,000 Birds)

Often, people discuss various animals’ responses to humans in terms of intelligence. Big white-tailed bucks are “smart” because they’re so wary of humans, but buffalo are “dumb” because they’re not. This is a flawed way of thinking about animal behavior, because it operates on the assumption that animals evolved with the sole concern of avoiding human predation — the smart ones figured it out, the dumb ones didn’t. In fact, many animals put a much greater emphasis on avoiding predators. It doesn’t necessarily suit an animal’s needs to burn precious calories by running like hell every time a predator appears, especially if the animal encounters a lot of predators that are unable to make successful attempts at killing it.

~ Steven Rinella, American Buffalo

@ The week in wildlife

The Brock Review is seeking scholarly essays and creative pieces for an upcoming issue on the theme of “Communicative Lands, Community Landscapes” (Volume 11, Number 2). This issue will focus on the perception, representation and phenomenology of landscapes as communicative devices and as centres of community. Submissions may focus on any historical era and/or geographical region. This issue will be co-edited by Dr. Katharine T. von Stackelberg (Department of Classics, Brock University). Submission deadline: 14th of May, 2010 (via)

A more effective — and popular — tactic to fending off the crows may be to employ the help of honeybees. “The bees become very aggressive when they see shiny black objects, because it reminds them of bears or hornets who might attack them. So whenever they see crows, a whole swarm of bees will chase them,” said Atsuo Tanaka, a co-founder of a hive-managing project in Tokyo called The Ginza Honeybee Project. The 300,000 bees Tanaka keeps on rooftops near a tony shopping district have another benefit: honey. The method may not be widely applicable just yet, but it could eventually prove to be one bird-friendly solution to a sticky situation.

~ Audubon Magazine Blog

First cathedrals, then elephants, and now crows. The bees shall inherit the earth.

In the long history in which humans have been getting caught in snowstorms, the way we have reacted to snow and interpreted it has shifted radically from place to place and era to era. For the Impressionists and the Japanese ukiyo-e artists, it was a force for beauty and contemplation. For the inhabitants of the Alps in the middle ages and after, it was associated with evil and witchcraft. Each society has interpreted the unusual and often spectacular event of a snowfall in a different way.

Perhaps the best way to track the cultural significance of snow is through art. Until the 16th century, artists showed little interest except where it had a religious context. Then came the shocking winter of 1564-5, the longest and most severe for more than a hundred years, and the first great winter of the intensely cold period in northern Europe that we now call the Little Ice Age.

~ Charlie English @ Guardian