Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg’s political group funds ads promoting Keystone and ANWR drilling

Grist and ThinkProgress report that Mark Zuckerberg’s new political group has spent considerable resources on ads advocating a host of anti-environmental causes — including drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and constructing the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

The umbrella group, co-founded by Facebook’s Zuckerberg, NationBuilder’s Joe Green, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Dropbox’s Drew Houston, and others in the tech industry, is called "FWD.US".

If you're dead set against the idea of shifting from an old, dirty, fossil-fuel-driven economy to a new, clean, knowledge-based one -- well, then keep right on enriching Facebook by visiting and using their website!

Coast Highway Improvement Project

As part of improvements planned for the stretch of Pacific Coast Highway that runs across the Buena Vista Lagoon just south of the Nature Center, there are apparently plans to add a concrete curb and sidewalk, and to eliminate all street-side parking.

Buena Vista Audubon Society (BVAS), the keepers of the Nature Center, are rightly concerned that these changes will result in frequent overcrowding of the Nature Center parking lot, making it difficult for visitors and BVAS members to access the facility.

BVAS suggests instead building a boardwalk along the east side of the road that crosses the Buena Vista Lagoon. BVAS says such a boardwalk might partially extend over the edge of the water, and could include several wider sections designed to accommodate fishermen and those wishing to observe wildlife. 

We here at SDVO like the idea of a boardwalk along the Coast Highway.  The only thing better ... would be a boardwalk that encircles the entire lagoon!  What an enduring waste it is that this rare resource is virtually locked away from the public which owns it.

Call for Least Tern data

In 2012, biologists studying least terns in Southern California attached geolocator devices to 42 California Least Terns.  These geolocator devices measure daylight in relation to an internal clock, and is used on small birds to track migratory and wintering routes.  

Yes, we know this isn't a LETE!

 The geolocator devices are visible on both standing and flying birds. They are a small, black, U-shaped device that was glued to leg bands.

The migratory and wintering routes of the endangered Least Tern are still little understood.  This study hopes to provide information about these aspects of the other eight months of these birds secret lives when they are not spending their summers in California.  

Since the Least Tern was declared an endangered species, a research priority has been to discover the location of their wintering grounds.  This is a joint effort by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, Los Angeles Audubon, and the Pasadena Audubon Society.
 
Thomas requests the help of the birding community in spotting returning birds. If you see an individual with one of these devices, please report it to the project biologist, Tom Ryan, at tryanbio@gmail.com.  Tom Ryan is President of Ryan Ecological Consulting and Southern California Center for Avian Studies.

With only 42 birds equipped, and with such fast-moving and small birds, spotting one of these devices will be tough.  But do what you can! 

10 – No, Make That 11! – Things We Can All Do For The Birds

 Over at Audubon Magazine, Susan Tweit suggests 10 things that you can do right now that would help our fine featered friends.

1. Make your yard a bird oasis

Provide the five wildlife bare necessities:  clean water, plants with flowers for nectar and insects (songbirds feed insects to their young), fruit-bearing plants to provide fuel for migration and winter, layers of plants for cover and thermal protection, and nesting habitat and materials. And not some exotics plants you like.  Native plants are the key to a useful environment for native wildlife!

2. Become a (citizen) scientist

Everyday bird observations, reported on a resource like eBird, provide crucial data that would never be gathered if we had to wait for "professional" scientists to get there.

3. Create human bird-focused communities

Share your passion for birds with family and friends. Expand your yard bird habitat by working with neighbors and managers of nearby parks, golf courses, and farms. 

4. Forgo pesticides

Since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published five decades ago, pesticide use in North America has grown to exceed 1.1 billion pounds annually.  Much of it is applied to lawns and gardens.  You can enhance your contribution, and save thousands of gallons of water annually as an added bonus, by killing your lawn and replacing it with shrubs, food gardens, trees, and groundcovers.

5. Shop for the birds

Buy grass-fed beef, switch to shade-grown coffee, and generally try to buy products certified by a reliable organization as being eco-friendly.

6. Join “Lights Out”

Glass-fronted buildings with bright nighttime lighting may be architecturally pleasing, but they’re deadly. Up to a billion birds—mostly migrants—are killed in building collisions in North America each year.  The U.S. Lights Out movement began in Chicago, where bird deaths at one building dropped by roughly 83 percent after the lights were turned off.  Help start a local Lights Out movement where you live!

7. Save energy, cut carbon emissions

PV Solar and a windmill in your yard are great.  But you can do more for the environment, and spend less doing it, by just cutting back on your energy consumption.  Behavior + technology can = big savings!

8. Part with plastics

Floating plastic bags kill hundreds of thousands of seabirds—along with sea turtles and marine mammals—which mistake them for jellyfish and squid, and then starve to death after filling their guts with plastic. Using less plastic also reduces petrochemical consumption and saves energy.

9. Curb your cats

America’s 150 million or so pet cats kill as many as 3,700,000,000 -- that's billion -- birds every year according to a new report from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Smithsonian’s Migratory Bird Center.  Oh, wait.  You think it's cool that your cat is such a great hunter?  Well, then you may as well stop right here.

10. Adopt-a-species

Pick a bird species from your flyway (choose from a list at audm.ag/AudPlan). Become an advocate for that species.  Learn all you can about it.  Work to protect and restore its habitat.  Educate your community about why it's an important species to know, love, and save.

* * *

And now, at the risk of aggravating the chasers and jet-setters out there, we'll suggest one more:

11.   Leave the flying to the birds

This is probably going to cause the most heartburn.  But the fact is, all this human flying all over the place is killing the planet.  And, of course, the birds with it.



If you're anything like us, we've always tended to think of airline travel as a form of public transportation — like a bus, except bigger and faster.  And if you look at aviation only in terms of gross CO2 production, it can certainly seem better than driving an SUV solo cross-country.

But calculations that focus only on fuel miss some important science. It turns out that plane emissions exert a particularly large greenhouse effect because they’re injected straight into the upper atmosphere. Scientists call this “radiative forcing,” and according to researchers at Germany's Atmosfair, it means that the effects of CO2, contrails, ozone, and other plane emissions drive global warming two to five times more than if calculated based on CO2 alone.
 
If you didn't know that, don't feel bad.  It turns out that people who self-identify as environmentalists take more frequent and longer flights than people who don’t label themselves enviros.  Some of these “green" jet-setters believe they’ve "earned" all these flights with their green behavior at home.

To make matters worse, however, greenhouse gases and global climate change are just the start of the problem.  

We've written previously about the wanton destruction of wildlife perpetrated continually in the U.S. by Interior's Wildlife Services using increasingly scarce tax dollars.  And a big part of that effort involves killing birds in and around airports in the name of safety.  

In just the most recently reported year (Oct 1, 2010 to Sep 30, 2011), the tally of birds killed, euthanized, or removed/destroyed (good news!  "Removed/destroyed" just means the "removal or destruction of dens and burrows"!) by Wildlife Services included (but is by no means limited to): 

 

·      1 Laysan Albatross

·      24,960 Double-crested Cormorants

·      3 Pelagic Cormorants

·      432 Greater Black-backed Gulls

·      142 Bonaparte’s Gulls

·      2770 California Gulls

·      154 Franklin’s Gulls

·      4,879 Glaucous-winged Gulls

·      4,435 Herring Gulls

·      4,820 Laughing Gulls

·      200 Mew Gulls

·      6,072 Ring-billed Gulls

·      474 Western Gulls

·      1 Long-tailed Jaeger

·      2 Red-legged Kittiwakes

·      1793 Mute Swans

·      2 Tundra Swans

·      2 Black Terns

·      9 Caspian Terns

·      4 Common Terns

·      8 Gull-billed Terns

·      1 Royal Tern

·      1 Bald Eagle

·      404 American Kestrels

·      14 Merlins

·      1 Broad-winged Hawk

·      45 Cooper’s Hawks

·      39 Ferruginous Hawks

·      142 Northern Harriers

·      1 Harris Hawk

·      21 Red-shouldered Hawk

·      902 Red-tailed Hawks

·      51 Rough-legged Hawks

·      9 Sharp-shinned Hawks

·      57 Swainson’s Hawks

·      31 Mississippi Kites

·      1 White-tailed Kite

·      101 Nighthawks

·      41 Ospreys

·      1 Barred Owl

·      1 Burrowing Owl

·      143 Common Barn Owls

·      39 Great Horned Owls

·      3 Short-eared Owls

·      62 Loggerhead Shrikes

·      5,508 Black Vultures

·      1,584 Turkey Vultures

·      6,608 Common Ravens

·      10,310 American Crows

·      657,134 Red-Winged Blackbirds

·      20,796 Brewer’s Blackbirds

·      359 Eastern Bluebirds

·      964 Lark Buntings

·      266 Northern Cardinals

·      45,435 Grackles

·      21,895 Mourning Doves (but why only 2,618 super-invasive Eurasian Collared Doves?)

·      120 Scissor-tailed Flycatchers

·      20 Chukars

·      45 Steller’s Jays 

·      25 Eastern Kingbirds

·      375 Western Kingbirds  

·      3,602 Horned Larks

·      18 Lapland Longspurs

·      322 Black-billed Magpies

·      1,501 Eastern Meadowlarks

·      1,482 Western Meadowlarks 

·      1 Say’s Phoebe

·      1 American Pipit 

·      229 American Robins  

·      1 Golden-crowned Sparrow

·      1 Grasshopper Sparrow

·      10 Lincoln’s Sparrows

·      107 Savannah Sparrows

·      277 White-crowned Sparrows 

·      215 Bank Swallows

·      926 Barn Swallows

·      3,941 Cliff Swallows

·      2 Northern Rough-winged Swallows

·      50 Tree Swallows

·      1 Violet-Green Swallows

·      2 Swifts 
·      19 California Towhees

·      417 Wild Turkeys

·      1 Downy Woodpecker

·      61 Gila Woodpeckers 

·      6 Golden-fronted Woodpeckers

·      106 Northern Flickers    

·      191 Atlantic Brants

·      1 Cackling Goose

·      23,700 Canada Geese

·      36 Greater White-fronted Geese

·      9 Buffleheads

·      13 Common Eiders

·      25 Gadwalls

·      5 Harlequin Ducks

·      10 Long-tailed Ducks

·      3036 Mallards

·      37 Hooded Mergansers

·      55 Northern Shovelers

·      85 Greater Scaups

·      84 Blue-winged Teals

·      110 Green-winged Teals

·      453 Sandhill Cranes

·      24 Dunlins

·      236 Great Egrets

·      204 Snowy Egrets

·      38 Pied-Billed Grebes

·      538 Great-blue Herons

·      32 Green Herons

·      8 Little Blue Herons 

·      15 Black-crowned Night-herons

·      15 Yellow-crowned Night-herons

·      2 Tricolored Herons 

·      79 White Ibises

·      17 White-faced Ibises

·      7 Black-bellied Plovers

·      20 American Golden Plovers

·      29 Semipalmated Plovers

·      2,014 Killdeers

·      14 American White Pelicans

·      8 Sanderlings

·      125 Least Sandpipers

·      3 Pectoral Sandpipers

·      3 Rock Sandpipers

·      31 Semipalmated Sandpipers

·      299 Upland Sandpipers

·      12 Western Sandpipers

·      99 Black-necked Stilts

·      69 Wilson’s Snipes

·      3 Whimbrels

·      26 Willets

·      3 American Woodcocks

·      51 Greater and Lesser Yellowlegs

And of course this staggering annual American death tally doesn’t include birds killed but not counted.  Or birds killed, but inaccurately counted.  Or birds killed but hidden.

And, of course, that death toll doesn't include the hundreds of thousands of birds killed every year in and around all those airports all over the world where your latest "eco-tour" flight may be headed.  

Still not that many birds you say in the grand scheme of things?  Well, what if that one Bald Eagle, or one of those Ferruginous Hawks, or that lone Laysan Albatross, was rubbed out so that your pleasure junket to Africa or Thailand or Costa Rica could take off on time?  Does that make a difference?

* * *

So if you care, what can you do?

For starters, go back and re-read #10 (adopt-a-species).  Forget those ridiculous four-digit, jet-setting life lists.  Instead, stay home and learn all you can about all the bird species in your local area.  Observe them in all seasons, year after year.  Observe them day and night.  Watch them in good weather and bad.  Chart their distribution on eBird.  Determine if their frequency is increasing or decreasing. 

Learn about what individuals of "your" species eat, how they procreate, and what things in your local environment help ... and hurt ... them.  

In short, become an expert on “your” species.  Then tell others what you've learned.  You'll be amazed at how it will enrich your connection with nature and your community, and how it will give you a whole new understanding of your own "back yard."

And when you do travel, ride your bike or take public transit whenever possible.

Drive if you must.  Carpool when you can.  But the next time you grab your bins or telescope to chase that hot-off-the-presses rarity that just came over the web ... stop and think about just why you need to see that bird in person.  Especially if you need to drive across the city, county, or even state to see it.  Is this a life bird for you?  If so, maybe it's worth the environmental cost.  Maybe.

Otherwise, is seeing this rarity one more time going to add anything to the body of knowledge?  If it was found, and especially if it was photographed, by a reliable observer ... well, probably not.  

And no matter what you might think or wish, it does nothing for the bird to have you add your eyes to the herd already headed out to trample the brush to see the poor, unsuspecting critter.   

* * *

Finally, if you absolutely, positively have to fly somewhere, buy carbon offsets from a reputable organization. 

But understand that you can never buy enough offsets to have a squeaky clean conscience.  As environmental journalist George Monbiot has sagely observed, “There is no way to halt global warming and continue traveling long distances at high speeds.”

When it comes to flying clean and green ... well, you just can't get there from here.