Shorts

This piece appeared on nationalgeographic.com on March 28, 2016:

A conversation with conservation photographer Gerrit Vyn that ran on Audubon.org November 16, 2015.

When photographer Gerrit Vyn talks about birds, he throws around adjectives like “insane,” and “incredible,” and “amazingly insanely incredible.” As a kid, he fixated on reptiles, then butterflies, then small mammals. But it was a White-breasted Nuthatch and a Tufted Titmouse that helped him get hooked on birds. That was when he was 12; now, 33 years later, Vyn spends around 150 days a year traveling all over the world for his avian obsession. He folds his 6-feet 8-inch frame into cramped airplane seats, and hunches in tiny blinds for hours, all in the name of conservation photography.

For the past 11 years Vyn has been a media producer for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, filming, photographing, and recording audio from birds. This October the lab celebrated its 100th anniversary by releasing The Living Bird, a coffee-table collection of Vyn’s portraits of North American birds. (See some selections below.) The book explores the lives of birds, what they mean to people, and how humans can help save them from environmental disaster. More…

This article appeared in the Nov. 9, 2015 print edition of High Country News.

Neal Clark has been watching his feet a lot this fall day. The young environmental lawyer chose flipflops for today’s tour of the Utah desert with the blithe self-assurance of someone comfortable outdoors. Remarkably, he’s stumbled into thorns only once. Now, he cautiously threads a gap between banks of cryptobiotic crust. The castle-like colonies of microorganisms anchor the thin topsoil; no conscientious environmentalist would crush them. But Clark pauses: Just ahead, an oil rig towers on a patch of earth scraped bare to accommodate trucks and equipment. “There’s something ironic about tiptoeing around crust next to something like this,” he says wryly.

That incongruity stretches far beyond this spot. Clark, who works for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, is pointing out Bureau of Land Management parcels that are being developed for oil and gas near Canyonlands National Park, Dead Horse Point State Park and some of the other scenic areas that have made nearby Moab an outdoor recreation mecca. More…

This web exclusive appeared on hcn.org Oct. 19, 2015:

We are high in the fold of a steep, boggy valley when my friend Sarah spots our quarry tucked amidst blueberry and dark hemlocks. The first yellow cedar is spindly, no more than four inches in diameter, with striated reddish bark and drooping feathery fronds that seem to fit the sodden, misty September day. We poke around and find another, then another; there are a couple hundred of the trees in this stand leaning over a cascading stream and spaced out along a hairpin bend in the trail that leads up to a Forest Service cabin above Juneau, Alaska.

Young as they are, they look a bit scraggly to my untrained eye, but they’re a small bright spot in an otherwise dark story: Yellow cedar, a culturally and commercially important tree prized for its strong, remarkably decay-resistant wood, has died in droves thanks to long-term climatic shifts, and will likely lose much more as human-induced warming advances. And yet here, the trees seem to be thriving. Scientists studying this and 14 other scattered, isolated stands around Juneau believe they may represent a leading edge of the tree’s migration northward into more favorable climes. The researchers hope the trees will yield clues on how best to conserve the species as temperatures climb. More…

From Audubon.org, Sept. 10, 2015:

Remember middle school? Well . . . maybe you don’t want to. It turns out, humans aren’t the only ones who go through agonizing rounds of teasing and torment to find their place in the pack. Other primates and mammals create social hierarchies, too, as do fish, hermit crabs, and birds.

A study published today in PLOS Computational Biology shows how one species of bird forms its pecking orders. The researchers focused on the Monk Parakeet, a bright green South American native that has invaded parts of the southern and eastern United States over the last 40 years. More…

From Audubon.org, Sept. 4, 2015:

This year the Lesser Prairie-Chicken has faced a variety of attacks aimed at undoing its recent listing. Now, a lawsuit filed by the Permian Basin Petroleum Association and four New Mexico counties has succeeded in doing just that—at least temporarily.

On September 1, a U.S. district judge in Texas vacated the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to designate the Lesser Prairie-Chicken as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. His ruling stated that prior to listing, the agency failed to follow its own rules for gauging whether existing conservation programs could help stem the bird’s decline. “It’s just one more cut into the (agency’s) authority and the efficacy of the ESA,” says Karyn Stockdale, a senior advisor for the National Audubon Society and former director of Audubon New Mexico. More…

This web exclusive appeared July 31, 2015 on hcn.org:

It feels a bit like a picnic until the Coast Guard starts lunging at boats with a hooked metal pole.

Dozens of colorful kayaks and canoes on Portland, Oregon’s Willamette River have been chasing shade under the St. Johns Bridge all day, their floppy-hatted passengers laughing and shouting slogans. People are crammed so tight on one side of a nearby floating dock that it lists to the side and water laps onto its boards. Some cheer, while others hoist speakers on lengths of PVC pipe, blasting the union anthem, “Which Side Are You On?”

Aside from a woman proudly holding a placard that reads: “Thank an oil company for all your protest/activist equipment,” it seems pretty clear which side most of the crowd favors. Thirteen Greenpeace activists dangle in climbing harnesses dozens of feet below the bridge. Their porta-ledges and stuffsacks, packed with days’ worth of supplies, are decorated with long red and yellow banners and giant signs reading “SHELL NO!” and “SAVE THE ARCTIC!” They and the kayaktivists, as the boaters have come to be called in recent months, are here to try to block the exit of the icebreaker MVS Fennica, which carries a key piece of safety equipment Royal Dutch Shell will need in order to move forward with oil drilling in the Chukchi Sea, off the north coast of Alaska. And at 7:30 that morning, they had already succeeded in turning it back once from the Columbia River, its gateway to the Pacific. “That was a little bit yay,” Sue Lenander, a 350.org member who came down from Seattle to join the flotilla, tells me. “But we can only fight them off for a day or two. It’s just a matter of time.” More…

This piece appeared in the July 20, 2015 print edition of High Country News:

On a sticky June evening, I pull onto the narrow shoulder of U.S. 30, 12 miles northwest of Portland, Oregon. Cars speed past my little Tacoma camper as I stroll down a short hill singed yellow by the heat wave. Nearly hidden from view behind rambunctious apple trees is Carey Haider’s two-story Quonset hut. Blackberry brambles creep along its edges, growing into a high thicket on the other side of the railroad tracks that run less than 20 paces from his back door. Beyond a towering power line, more mushroom clouds of greenery explode along the banks of the Multnomah Channel, blocking it from view.

Haider, who sports a beard and suspenders, leads me past an overturned toilet to piles of sledgehammered sheetrock and siding. There, he points out a flat spot where I can park and lay my head for the night. “It looks like a meth house right now,” apologizes the 31-year-old graphic designer and photographer. He bought the property in December and is in the midst of overhauling it. “Whatever,” I tell him. “It beats KOA.”

I mean it, too, even though Haider’s planned noise-blocking fence, camp trailers and wood-fired hot tub aren’t yet in place. Finding a private, pleasant spot to sleep outdoors, especially near a city, can be tough. Try a pullout or parking lot, and you’ll often find a police flashlight in your face at 2 a.m. And state and national park and forest campgrounds overflow with generator-grinding RVs. Haider has signed up with a new Portland-based startup called LandApart to provide campers with another way: Access to private land via an online service. More…