Animal Rights Activists Freeing Caged Ortolans

Hunting and eating Ortolan Buntings has been illegal in France since 1999, but the bird is considered a delicacy. Thus the practice of trapping and selling caged Ortolans to high-end restaurants continues. The songbirds killed for gourmet dinners may number in the tens of thousands. Recently animal rights activists have released caged Ortolans back into the wild.

In a co-ordinated protest, members of the League for the Protection of Birds (LPO) destroyed hundreds of traps and set free the birds inside. The time had come, they said, to prioritise biodiversity over gastronomy.

"For 10 years now, not only has the state turned a blind eye [to the poachers] but it has been complicit," said Allain Bougrain-Dubourg, president of the LPO. "It is time to make the state face up to its responsibilities."

Even when I am sympathetic with their goals, as in this case, I always hesitate when I read of activists released birds (or other animals) into the wild because in so many cases animals have been released into inappropriate habitat or domesticated animals have been released even though they might not be able to survive on their own. In this case, the birds are clearly wild in origin and the releases appear to be in their original habitat. At least I hope my reading is the correct one.

This seems like an issue dear to Charlie's heart, so I imagine he will have something to say about it.

EPA Planning to Declare CO2 a Pollutant, But Not Yet

According to news reports, Lisa Jackson is planning to declare that carbon dioxide is a pollutant.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told reporters that a formal "endangerment finding," which would trigger federal regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, probably would "happen in the next months."

Jackson announced her timeline even as top senators said they were delaying plans to introduce legislation that would set new limits on carbon dioxide emissions. Senators had been scheduled to unveil legislation next Tuesday, but the date has now been pushed back to later in September.

Such a declaration would have serious effects.

The EPA can formalize the finding anytime, now that it has closed a 60-day public comment period that netted more than 300,000 responses.

A formal endangerment finding would obligate the agency to regulate greenhouse gas pollution under the Clean Air Act - even if Congress doesn't pass a final climate-change bill.

President Obama and Jackson have said they would prefer that Congress - rather than the EPA - take the lead in implementing new greenhouse gas limits. Businesses and energy industry leaders also have largely favored congressional action over EPA-imposed limits, because they believe lawmakers are better positioned to combine economic safeguards with any new carbon cap.

Carbon dioxide is not what we normally think of as pollution, since that term normally refers to toxic substances released into the environment. Instead, carbon dioxide is a normal product of our respiratory system, and it is vital for plants. However, the dose makes the poison, and in the case of carbon dioxide, excess amounts could trigger catastrophic climate change, which would be harmful to human health and well-being. So, as the Supreme Court recognized, it is right and necessary that the U.S. government take action on this issue. Given the current inability of Senate leadership to move useful legislation, regulations issued by the EPA may be the preferable route. If businesses would prefer that Congress deal with the issue, then they need to put some pressure on their favorite Senators to get a bill passed.

Warbler at a Hummingbird Feeder

This video of a warbler visiting a hummingbird feeder was posted on YouTube.

Songbirds sometimes visit hummingbird feeders, either to drink nectar or to catch insects attracted to the feeder. (See the photos here for another example.) Many warbler species, which primarily eat invertebrates during the breeding season, will drink nectar from flowers on their winter grounds in Central and South America. So it is not all that surprising that they would take advantage of artificial nectar sources as well.

The bird in the video above is most likely a Prothonotary Warbler. Not many warblers have that combination of bright yellow throat and breast, white vent, and plain upperparts (with a bluish cast). The dark head may indicate a hatch year bird. While spring adult males have bright yellow head, other plumages show varying amounts of olive on the nape and crown, with the most olive coverage on first fall birds. Prothonotary is one of the warbler species known to nectar.

The only element that bothers me is the apparent dusky neck,* but that could be an effect of the lighting, which appears to be coming from behind. I also do not see location information on the video or user pages, so there is a question of whether the range is appropriate. The site is in North Carolina, so this would be within the Prothonotary Warbler's normal range. What do you think?

* After checking a few more sources, I found that first fall Prothonotaries may have an olive wash on the flanks and throat.

Thanks to Peter Vankevich for bring the video to my attention.

Greenland's Glaciers

In a few posts over the last year or so, I have linked to news stories about Greenland's ice sheet (and the Arctic generally) melting much faster than previously expected in response to climate change. Most of these stories have reported new photographs or data without much detail about why or how the melting has outpaced predictions. This article in The Guardian interviews several scientists involved in Arctic research who are trying to answer those questions. One anecdote stood out to me immediately:

Before their first expedition, Hamilton and his colleague Leigh Stearns, from the University of Kansas, used satellite data to plan exactly where they would land on a glacier.

"When we arrived there was no glacier to be seen. It was way up the fjord," he says. "We thought we'd made some stupid goof with the co-ordinates, but we were where we were supposed to be." It was the glacier that was in the wrong place. A vast expanse had melted away.

When Hamilton and Stearns processed their first measurements of the glacier's speed, they thought they had made another mistake. They found it was marching forwards at a greater pace than a glacier had ever been observed to flow before. "We were blown away because we realised that the glaciers had accelerated not just by a little bit but by a lot," he says. The three glaciers they studied had abruptly increased the speed by which they were transmitting ice from the ice sheet into the ocean.

One reason that Greenland's ice sheet is melting faster than ice sheets in Antarctica is that Greenland's is somewhat farther from the pole. But that is not the only reason. One contributing factor is that the ocean around it is warming as well.

She has been surprised by early results measuring sea water close to the melting glaciers: one probe recovered from last year recorded a relatively balmy 2C at 60 metres in the fjord in the middle of winter. Straneo said: "This warm and salty water is of subtropical origin – it's carried by the Gulf Stream. In recent years a lot more of this warm water has been found around the coastal region of Greenland. We think this is one of the mechanisms that has caused these glaciers to accelerate and shed more ice."

Straneo's research is looking at what scientists call the "dynamic effects" of the Greenland ice sheet. It is not simply that the ice sheet is melting steadily as global temperatures rise. Rather, the melting triggers dynamic new effects, which in turn accelerate the melt.

"It's quite likely that these dynamic effects are more important in generating a near-term rapid rise in sea level than the traditional melt," says Hamilton. Another example of these dynamic effects is when the ice sheet melts to expose dirty layers of old snow laced with black carbon from forest fires and even cosmic dust. These dark particles absorb more heat and so further speed up the melt.

The faster that Greenland's glaciers melt, the faster and higher we can expect sea levels to rise. Higher sea levels, of course, pose a major threat to any coastal city. Additional feedback effects are hard to predict until they start to happen. In any case the original article is worth a read. It gives a detailed look at what is happening with Arctic climate research.

Verizon Sponsoring a Mountaintop Removal Rally

Verizon Wireless, which claims that "environmental stewardship is ingrained in [its] heritage," is among the corporate sponsors for a rally in favor of mountaintop removal mining, one of the most destructive forms of energy production. The rally is hosted by Massey Energy at the site of one of its mines in West Virginia. It will feature a parade of right-wing propagandists and climate change deniers.

I read about this via The Nation, which has more information about Massey Energy and its practices.

Massey Energy, the largest producer of Central Appalachian coal, holds out no pretense of pro-environmental sympathies. In a 2008 landmark settlement which it fought tooth-and-nail, Massey agreed to pay $20 million in fines to the EPA to resolve more than 4,500 violations of the Clean Water Act for polluting waterways in West Virginia and Kentucky with coal slurry and wastewater.

One of the country's foremost practitioners of mountaintop removal, a radical form of coal mining in which entire mountains are blown up, devastating hundreds of square miles of Appalachia and polluting the headwaters of rivers, the company has fiercely lobbied against Obama administration and EPA efforts to crack down on the practice.

There is contact information at the link if you're not happy about Verizon sponsoring this.