Bird vs. Building

How many birds has your building killed today?

The Times says an estimated one billion birds die, per year, crashing into buildings! What! "There are no easy fixes," says the article. Less reflective glass, patterns, nets, even glass with ultraviolet signals, are unappealing options for designers, though they've been implemented successfully in some cases, and may soon be required, by law, for new buildings in San Francisco.

Lighting also is a problem, at night, when bright lights can confuse birds.

But Glen Philips of the New York City Audubon makes a good point: "I hope there will come a time when putting up an all-glass building is like wearing a fur coat."

Elephants' lifespans drastically cut short by poaching

Absent from my post below ("Zoos News") was a perspective that incorporates conservation and poaching — a glaring omission.

Six suspects stand accused in the US of working with "a trans-Atlantic ring that routinely sneaked ivory, much of it elaborately carved, out of three African countries — Uganda, Ivory Coast and Cameroon — that prohibit such exports and then slipped it past customs agents at Kennedy Airport..." according to the New York Times.

"Poaching elephants for their ivory is still the primary factor in the decline of their populations in Africa, wildlife officials say."

And in National Geographic is an article on the dizzying losses of elephants to poaching in Chad, a "massacre," in the words of one observer, that could wipe out the population within three years. The army helps guards and employees protect elephants in Zakouma National Park, but clashes with poachers can prove fatal.

A serious examination of these majestic megafauna's quality of life in our zoos should of course inquire into their lives at home, and their prospects for conservation there. Questions arise like how to shift priorities in impoverished countries where ordinary people have few options but to poach or starve.

And how do we reverse environmental degradations like global warming so that our friend Knut the polar bear won't be sent home to find all his ice melted?

New Species: Legless lizards, dwarf woodpeckers, and Neil Young

National Geographic bites my style this week with a photo gallery of newly discovered species in Brazil's Cerrado, a wooded grassland that's seen an increasing threat of urban and agricultural encroachment.

Most stories lead with the "legless lizard" discovered there, but we all know that that's just a snake. Among the fourteen new species found in the Cerrado are a tiny woodpecker, and a fat-tailed mouse opossum.

The discoveries, along with the documentation of several endangered species in the region, renewed a push by conservationists to develop a management plan for the area, according to MSNBC.

More important is a species of trapdoor spider, actually discovered in 2007, that has only just now been named - after Neil Young. The trapdoor spider is so named because it fashions a plug to cover the entrance of its burrow, and will wait under it to pounce at passing prey. Jason Bond named the spider Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi because he admires Young's music as well as his political activism.