Last Thursday world-renowned conservationist J. Michael Fay came to Seattle at our invitation to talk about some of the emerging mining threats to the remote northwestern corner of British Columbia. The area was mostly untouched by human development until the past several years until an enormous number of large-scale mining projects, driven by rising gold [...]

I just came across some relatively new papers I had not seen that shared some eye-opening new facts about migratory connectivity in some northern birds. A paper published in 2012 describes the results of a project that placed geo-locators (small devices that record day length information which can be used to calculate geographic location) on [...]

The following is a guest post by Christian Artuso of Bird Studies Canada. Over the past few years he has been helping to organize and develop the Manitoba Breeding Bird Atlas, a comprehensive outlook of which birds breed in Manitoba and where. As Christian mentions below Manitoba has an extremely low population density, making the extraordinary volunteering [...]

Caspian Terns in Maine
Credit: Mike Fahay
A comical looking bird the size of a small gull with a black cap, gray back and a bill that looked like a carrot was spotted stopping off on a beach in mid-coast Maine last week on its way south. Staying close by its side and making regularly whistley-squawky [...]

In our last post we outlined the success of the terrific Whimbrel satellite tracking program led by the Center for Conservation Biology and partners. It has led to all sorts of new information about Whimbrels and their migration. Of particular note was the recent discovery of a new migration route being used by several Whimbrels [...]

Until recently, Whimbrels have proved to be somewhat of a mystery to scientists. Noting a decline among the long-distant migrants, which typically breed up in arctic Canada, scientists set out to better understand the everyday life of a Whimbrel and what might be leading to their decline.

Whimbrel
Credit: James Robinson
Part of the difficulty in understanding [...]

‘Hope’ is becoming increasingly familiar with this blog. Not just because we do our darndest  to be optimistic (and several conservation gains in Canada’s boreal in the past few years have affirmed this right—including recent good news in Quebec). But because one amazing Whimbrel named Hope has provided much joy for this blog over the [...]

Jeff was recently out on vacation, so I thought I would post about an interesting article I came across last week about some of the lesser-known values trees and forests provide. Hope you enjoy…
-David

Trees in Canada’s boreal forest
Credit: Garth Lenz
Trees, trees, and more trees. It’s hard to picture yourself embedded within a landscape of [...]

Smokestacks and tailpipes aren’t the only major source of emissions.
Credit: Wikimedia user: Dori
Although most people envision smokestacks and tailpipe exhaust when thinking about greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation is an often underreported component of our human contribution to climate change. Most estimates place carbon emissions from deforestation at somewhere between 12-25% of all human emissions at [...]

Today is World Water Day. With high temperatures scorching much of the United States and Canada many of you may be turning World Water Day into World Water Park Day, but regardless of how you spend it we should all spend a minute to appreciate the ultimate source of life on earth.
The UN’s theme this [...]