Natural History Journal

Like most folks, our travel plans for this summer have been scrapped.  As we try to come up with alternative plans compliant with social distancing regulations and such, I've been looking back at some of the magnificent places we have been fortunate enough to visit in the past several years. Two years ago, during our semi-annual desert pilgrimage, Eric and I spent a couple of days around the Salton Sea, California's largest and most imperiled lake. The tale of the Salton Sea stretches far back into geologic time to the Pleistocene (between about 2.5 million and 11,000 years ago), when the meandering course of the Colorado River shifted north as it crossed its broad delta at the northern edge of the ancestral Gulf of California.  This type of shift happened more than once, causing the Salton Basin (or Salton Sink) to alternately fill with water, then evaporate, then fill again.  The cycle was repeated several times, as evidenced by the presence of wave-cut shorelin...

Download this infographic (and more) from the World Wetland Day's website: https://www.worldwetlandsday.org/materials/-/categories/11086 Celebrated annually on February 2nd, World Wetlands Day marks the anniversary of the 1971 Ramsar  Convention, also known as the Convention on Wetlands, an international treaty created to support the conservation and sustainable use of wetlands around the world.  Currently, there are over 2,300 Ramsar sights, or Wetlands of International Importance, that have been designated worldwide - which is good news considering the sad state of our world's wetlands. Since 1970, 35% of wetlands have been lost, at a rate three times greater than the loss of forests ( source ).  In the continental United States, over half of all wetlands have been destroyed since the 1700's ( source , source ). California alone has lost between 90 and 95% of its wetlands. Sunset at Merced NWR, a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance, right here in Cali...

"There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.  Like winds and sunset, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them." Aldo Leopold, 1949 Last week, on September 19, 2019, the journal Science published the results of a groundbreaking study, the first of its kind to document, with certainty, that North American birds are in big trouble. Young male House Finch Observant folks who have been around a while have been saying it for some time: "There just aren't as many birds around now as there were back in my day."  Indeed, numbers of birds have dropped dramatically over the past 50 years, and now we have the data to prove it.  It's not just a hunch, not just a feeling, not just the tendency to look at the past through lenses tinted with nostalgia for the "good ol' days."  Grandpa is right: there are fewer birds today than there were "in his day." Birds really are in dec...