The Casual Blog

Tag: bird song

May 20, 2025

Local birds, and Trump’s war on nature

Recently I’ve taken a couple of boat trips on Jordan Lake with the Carolina Nature Photographers Association to see some of the birds that live there.  According to our guide, Captain Dave, there are some forty nesting pairs of bald eagles there now, along with many ospreys, great blue herons, woodpeckers, various ducks, and many smaller birds.  

There was a lot happening.  We saw eagles hunting for food and battling over territory.  Ospreys were incubating their eggs.  Wood ducks were shy and flew away quickly.  Several tree swallows had a battle royale over a strategic perch.  At one point hundreds of cormorants were flying and diving together in a coordinated hunt of the local small fish.  

I’ve also been enjoying listening to the springtime songs of the birds in our backyard.  A few years ago I invested some energy into learning common bird songs and calls from recordings.  Lately I’ve been expanding my repertoire with Merlin, a free app from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.  Listening along with Merlin to the birds from our back deck, I’ve discovered several species whose songs I didn’t know and who almost always hide behind the leaves.  It’s a great little app! 

With American democracy in crisis, and a wide array of related disasters in process, it isn’t surprising that bird song and nature generally are not top of mind for most people.  But I find their strength and beauty inspiring, and a source of strength.  

What’s more, the welfare of nature is the welfare of us all.  It’s such a mistake to think that the world is all about humans, and nature is of secondary concern, or no concern.  We humans are just one part of the grander scheme of nature.  We can’t destroy nature without destroying ourselves.

It’s both bizarre and tragic that part of the Trump program seems aimed at just such destruction.  I’ve puzzled over why this could seem like a good idea to anyone.  Paul Krugman, the Nobel-prize-winning economist, offered a possible answer in a recent free email newsletter. 

Krugman usually writes on economic subjects, and I’ve found him helpful in illuminating some of the leading stories coming out of Trumpworld.  In writing about the tax plans now in process, he pointed out that part of the program for funding tax cuts for the rich is cutting government support for clean energy and increasing subsidies for fossil fuels.  

Krugman notes that the reason surely has a lot to do with our system in which campaign contributions buy policy decisions – a system that seems to me a sort of legalized bribery.  The fossil fuel industry contributes much more to Republicans.  But he notes, there seems to be more than just money at stake. 

Why does MAGA hate renewables? They consider them woke because they help fight climate change, which they insist is a hoax. And they’re cleaner than burning fossil fuels, which means that they aren’t manly.

It’s all kind of funny — or would be if it weren’t so tragic.

Krugman writes that the dramatic progress in renewables technology has made it possible for us to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.  The price of wind and solar power has been falling quickly.  But Trump has opposed these technologies and taken aim at the Democratic programs to advance them.  

David Gelles of the NY Times has a good new piece on several aspects of the Trump approach to our climate crisis.  He gives a pithy summary of our basic situation: 

Average global temperatures last year were the hottest on record and 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, a threshold that nations had been working to avoid. Every fraction of a degree of additional warming raises the risk of severe effects and possibly irreversible changes to the planet. Nations must make deep and fast cuts to pollution to avoid a grim future of increasingly violent weather, deadly heat waves, drought, water scarcity and displacement . . . .

Can nothing be done?  In fact, a lot can be done, as demonstrated around the world. Gelles explains that the current administration is unique among major world powers in its preposterous denial of climate change and refusal to act.

Around the world, countries are racing to adapt to a rapidly warming planet, reduce pollution and build clean energy. China, the only other superpower, has made a strategic decision to adopt clean energy and then sell it abroad, dominating the global markets for electric vehicles, solar panels and other technologies. Even Saudi Arabia, the second-largest producer of oil after the United States, is spending heavily on wind and solar power.

Here in the US, we’re taking a different approach, as Gelles explains.

The president’s proposed budget calls for eliminating funding for “the Green New Scam,” including $15 billion in cuts at the Energy Department for clean energy projects and $80 million at the Interior Department for offshore wind and other renewable energy. The administration has frozen approvals for new offshore wind farms and imposed tariffs that would raise costs for renewable energy companies. Republicans in Congress want to repeal billions of dollars in tax incentives for production and sales of solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles and other clean energy technologies.

At the same time, per Gelles,

The Environmental Protection Agency, which has been the government’s lead agency in terms of measuring and controlling greenhouse gas emissions, is being overhauled to end those functions. The administration is shredding the E.P.A.’s staff and budget and wants to revoke its two most powerful climate regulations: limits on pollution from tailpipes and smokestacks.

Mr. Trump has said that relaxing limits on pollution from automobiles wouldn’t “mean a damn bit of difference to the environment.”

But transportation is the largest single source of greenhouse gases generated by the United States and its pollution is linked to asthma, heart disease, other health problems and premature deaths.

Trump is also cutting federal disaster relief programs led by FEMA.

As human-caused global warming increases, disasters are becoming more frequent, destructive and expensive. There were just three billion-dollar disasters in the United States in 1980, but that total increased to 27 last year, according to data collected by NOAA. The agency said last week that it would no longer tally and publicly report the costs of extreme weather.

Finally, Trump is undermining the research at the foundation of past efforts to anticipate emergencies and mitigate climate change.’

Last month, the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who had been working on the National Climate Assessment, a report mandated by Congress that details how global warming is affecting specific regions across the country.

In recent weeks, more than 500 people have left the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the government’s premier agency for climate and weather science. That has led the National Weather Service, an agency within NOAA, to warn of “degraded operations.”

NOAA also stopped monthly briefing calls on climate change, and the president’s proposed budget would eliminate funding for the agency’s weather and climate research. The administration has purged the phrases “climate crisis” and “climate science” from government websites.

There’s more; Gelles’s piece is worth reading in its entirety.  There are a lot of reasons to stop Trumpism, but the war on the health of the planet is enough by itself.  State and local officials are the next line of defense, and they need our encouragement. 

October 25, 2024

More on our South African safari and new discoveries on birds and plants

I finally finished going through the thousands of pictures I took during our South Africa safari, and found a few more I wanted to share. 

During the safari, we saw animals doing many of the things we know they have to do, like eating, drinking, bathing, teaching their young, and mating.  We didn’t see any actual kills, but we did see several big cats feeding on recent kills.   I debated whether to share photographs of those, since it’s unavoidably sad, and perhaps upsetting, to deal with the death of a beautiful creature like an impala.  But I also see an element of beauty in the predator and his or her success.  

The lions, leopards, and cheetahs must kill to survive and to feed their young.  It’s just the way they’re made.  It turns out that it’s quite difficult for them to hunt successfully, and they often fail.  Grazing animals are highly sensitive to predator risks, and most of them are, when healthy, either faster or stronger than their predators.  On this trip, we watched a hidden lion lie in ambush for lengthy periods hoping, unsuccessfully, for an unwary zebra or impala.  

The grazing animals that the big cats catch are generally the old, young, or ill.  In fact, their hunting is important for the health of the grazing herds.  It  keeps diseases in check and prevents overpopulation and overgrazing that would lead to more death.  Nature generally manages to keep things remarkably well balanced among predators, prey, and plants, when there isn’t human interference.

There’s a vast amount that we do not know about nature, which is exciting, in a way:  there’s so much more to learn.  This week the New Yorker had a lively and interesting piece by Rivka Galchen about what scientists are learning about bird song. 

I’ve been interested in bird song for many years, but mainly as a way to identify birds that won’t allow themselves to be seen.  From watching flocks of big birds like tundra swans and Canada geese, I’d come to suspect that their vocalizations allowed them to coordinate their travels together.  Now researchers are confirming the suspicion that their sounds have a lot of communicative content.  

Scientists have long recognized that birds make specific alarm calls, and are learning that some of those calls differentiate the threats of, say, a hawk or a snake.  It turns out that bird parents make sounds while incubating their eggs that the developing baby bird learns.  We’re learning that bird communication is more complex than we thought, which indicates that their intelligence is more complex than we thought.  

With fall arriving, it’s gotten a bit chilly for me to have my morning tea on our deck, but when it’s mild I like to sit out there as the sun is rising and listen to the birds.  I’ve been using the Merlin app to identify calls and songs I don’t already know.  The app has gotten a lot better over the last couple of years, and is almost always accurate, at least as to the birds I’m familiar with.  

Speaking of the natural world, I’m in the midst of a remarkable book about plants:  The Light Eaters:  How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, by Zoe Schlanger.  Schlanger has reviewed the scientific literature and interviewed leading botany experts researching how plants sense the world and deal with their environments.  Her style is friendly and approachable, and her content is at times mind blowing.  

It turns out that plants are much more  proactive than we used to think.  There are species that modify their chemistry in response to predators to make themselves less appetizing.  There are ones that send out chemical signals to warn others of their kind of particular predators.  Some even send out chemical signals to summon insects that will prey upon the plants’ enemies.  

There is considerable evidence that plants respond to touch.   Some researchers have found that they respond to certain sounds, which we might call hearing.  They modify their behavior to avoid threats and to improve their nutrition.  The puzzle is that they lack a clear hearing organ, like an ear, or a centralized interpretive organ, like a brain.  How they do it is yet to be discovered.  

But it’s hard to avoid the thought that plants are in some sense conscious.  Schlanger recognizes that the idea of plant intelligence is still controversial in the botanical science world, and gives credit to scientists for being cautious and careful.  In this time of great anxiety about the human world of politics and war, her new book is a welcome reminder that, quite apart from humans, the world has been and continues to be full of wonders.