Pine Country

The Nature Conservancy

For millennia, longleaf pine forests stretched 92 million acres across the U.S. Southeast. Less than 5 million acres remain.

This Is the Perfect Plan to Rewild the American West. There’s Just One Problem: Politics.

Outside Online

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Swamps Can Protect Against Climate Change, If We Only Let Them

The New Yorker

It can be hell finding one’s way across an extensive boggy moor—the partially dry, rough ground and the absence of any landmarks let the eye rove helplessly into the monotype distance. Everything undulates, the rise and fall share the same muted palette, and the senses dull.

To Revive a River, Restore Its Hidden Gut

Scientific American

Salmon are so elemental to Indigenous peoples who live along North America’s northwestern coast that for generations several nations have called themselves the “Salmon People.” But when settlers came, their forms of agricultural and urban development devastated the mighty fish.

Absent for More Than a Century, California Condors Soar Above the Redwoods Again

Audubon

Pledge to stand with Audubon to call on elected officials to listen to science and work towards climate solutions. After more than a century, California Condors are once again roaming the skies above the Pacific Northwest.

Is This the Last Generation to Live on New York City’s Wild Fringes?

Don Riepe pointed to the line on the wall five and a half feet above his kitchen floor. That was where floodwaters reached during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. His home, a humble two-story wooden structure, is decorated with nautical maps, horseshoe crabs and assorted maritime paraphernalia.

Wandering Spoonbills Tell Us What We Need to Protect the Everglades

Audubon

Pledge to stand with Audubon to call on elected officials to listen to science and work towards climate solutions. Less than an hour outside Miami lies the largest subtropical wetland in the United States and the most extensive wilderness east of the Mississippi.

Restoring Sea Turtles’ Numbers Also Restored Their Ecosystem

Scientific American

Under cover of darkness, the female turtle crawls up the beach. Her front flippers alternate to pull 250 pounds of shell and flesh towards the dunes, inch by inch. Encased in heavy armor of fused ribs and bony plates, an adult sea turtle is safe from all but the fiercest predatory fish.

Ghost Forests Could Provide Respite for Marsh Birds as Coastal Habitat Disappears

Audubon

At Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Maryland, acres upon acres of dead tree trunks stand sentinel, their bases partially covered by salt water. Back in 2003, Hurricane Isabel struck the refuge before it could recover from an unusually dry summer.

The Queen of the Desert

The New Yorker

“Next Services 57 Miles” reads a sign at the southern end of California State Route 127, which goes from the Mojave Desert town of Baker up to the Nevada border, skirting the edge of Death Valley National Park.

The Enormous Hole That Whaling Left Behind

The Atlantic

In the 20th century, the largest animals that have ever existed almost stopped existing. Baleen whales—the group that includes blue, fin, and humpback whales—had long been hunted, but as whaling went industrial, hunts became massacres.

A Long-Awaited Homecoming for Peregrine Falcons in the Finger Lakes

All About Birds

From the Autumn 2021 issue of Living Bird magazine. Subscribe now. Just a few miles north of Ithaca, New York, Taughannock Creek (pro­nounced tuh-GAN-uck) carves between the sheer rock walls of a 400-foot gorge, dropping toward Cayuga Lake in a free-fall curtain of water taller than Niagara Falls.