October 2021 - Favorite World Press

The FWP weekly digest of wondrous wildlife happenings
and other interesting items from the natural world

Creatures to meet | Things to learn
Things to do

Lisa S. French

Dear Earth,

When many individual good things coalesce to create one great good thing, keeping you healthy and functioning, that’s a true and necessary thing.

Thinking of you during one of the most extraordinarily challenging times in your life history—ever hopeful for the recognition of the transformational power of many good things.

With love and gratitude for all that you do,

LSF • WW • FWP

After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.

Wallace Stevens

COP26

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Lisa S. French October 30, 2021

Back in Black—and Orange: California Monarchs

1-minute read

If you’re in need of some good news this week, we’re happy to oblige with a hopeful update from the Pacific Grove monarch butterfly sanctuary in Northern California. Since the 1980s, the number of monarchs west of the Rockies has dropped by an alarming 99%. In 2019, as reported by the Washington Post, there were zero sightings at the sanctuary. Zero. This year, observers counted 2,500 monarchs in the pollinator’s Pacific Grove migratory rest stop. That’s good news, indeed!

While the 2021 sightings aren’t a guarantee of more monarchs to come, taking action to make the planet more hospitable for butterflies by increasing pollinator habitat, reducing pesticide use, and combating climate change will improve the odds of long-term recovery. If you’d like to help ensure that monarch butterflies east or west are back to stay, here are some make-it-better organizations offering handy tools to enable you to lend a hand with monitoring and mapping the migration of the winged beauties across the United States:

And if you’d like to attract monarchs as well as other pollinators to your personal patch, we’re firm believers in the plant-it-and-they-will-come paradigm. You can find useful info on how to garden to increase biodiversity by cultivating habitats in your backyard, front yard, side yard, or window box here. Because whatever else is going on in the world, and something’s always going on, it’s better with butterflies. Just ask our in-house butterfly gardeners, Frankie and Peaches.

To encourage budding young pollinator gardeners in your school or neighborhood, you can order milkweed seeds from Save Our Monarchs to hand out as a special butterfly-saving treat this spooky season and year-round. Wishing you a happily hair-raising Halloween!

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Lisa S. French October 23, 2021

Where, Oh Where Are The Walruses?

1-minute read

The monitoring of wildlife, habitats, and ecosystems is critical to conservation. But keeping tabs on what’s happening in the natural world—changes in the number of different species and populations of specific species, and how they move and interact with the environment across millions of square miles of land and sea—is no simple task. Now, thanks to advances in conservation technology, tracking endangered, elusive, and widely dispersed animals is getting a whole lot easier. Scientists are employing a diverse range of tech tools, including radar, sonar, motion sensors, camera traps, drones, smartphones, and satellites, to gather information that will aid in the development of nature-saving strategies. One of the greatest remaining challenges is deciphering all of that captured data. That’s where citizen scientists come in.

Walrus Headcount
To amplify global conservation efforts, researchers are asking all of you wildlife watchers out there to pitch in with planetary health checks by keeping a lookout and sharing what you see. One of the crowdsourced projects taking place right now is Walrus from Space, the Atlantic and Laptev walrus census. The World Wildlife Fund and the British Antarctic Survey hope to enlist half a million people over the next four years to contribute to the counting of walruses by searching for the tusked creatures in satellite images. This sea mammal census aims to determine how environmental changes, like global heating, impact the walrus populations of Canada, Norway, Greenland, and Russia.

Do you have an eagle eye—or two? Do you know a walrus when you see one? Although an adult walrus can weigh as much as a Mazda Miata—about 2,200 pounds—pinpointing the massive sea creatures in the vast expanse of Arctic waters is trickier than you might imagine. Are you up for the challenge? Become a walrus detective and put your keen sight to the test. Register with the WWF here to see what you can see—in the sea—and help to secure the future of these iconic marine animals.

More People-Powered Projects
If you’d like to explore more ways to connect with the conservation community to share your observations of our planet’s flora and fauna, check out these “I spy” projects:

Bird Alert
Before we go, a quick heads up that polling is now open for New Zealand’s Bird of the Year. Exciting! Get to know the 2021 contestants and cast your votes! We think all of the birds are winners, but we’re going to go out on a limb and predict that the rockhopper penguin will be this year’s it bird. The endangered little rock climber most definitely looks like a champion.

Turtle Tsunami
Oh, and one more helping nature heal, turtle-y amazing conservation item: news of an extraordinary mass hatching event. Thanks to the successful monitoring and management of giant South American river turtles by the World Conservation Society Brasil, tens of thousands of the little shelled critters made their way to the water world they’ll call home. Behold the turtle tsunami!

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Lisa S. French October 17, 2021

A family of Superb Fairy-wrens in South Eastern New South Wales, Australia; brilliant blue and black father and cute brown chicks on a branch with leafy green background

Bestest Australian Bird: The Superb Fairy-Wren

1.5-minute read

Australia is home to some of the world’s most remarkable birds—brolgas, galahs, rosellas, currawongs—to name a splendid few. According to BirdLife International’s State of the World’s Birds report, like many species globally, Australia’s birds are threatened by the ongoing environmental stressors of habitat loss and climate change. For the past two weeks, to help raise awareness of the need to protect the island continent’s diverse avian wildlife, friends of the feathered cast their votes for the top-of-the-tree, best-in-beaks Bird of the Year.

The 2021 all-around favorite, announced on October 8, was the superb fairy-wren, a passerine, aka perching bird, that inhabits backyards and woodlands across eastern Australia and Tasmania. Although the fairy-wren edged out our preferred pick, the tawny frogmouth, by a chin feather, we can appreciate the songbird’s many winning attributes. For starters, it’s hard not to be positively inclined toward a creature called “superb”. In addition to their esteem-enhancing moniker, the dainty songsters have other champion qualities:

It takes a bird village:
Superb fairy-wrens raise their young in cooperative social groups. One to four male helpers support nesting parents by contributing to the defense and feeding of hatchlings.

Winged chameleons:
During mating season, the plumage of the male superb fairy-wren changes from a muddy brown to a striking shade of blue. While female fairy-wrens prefer the males that turn blue first and stay blue the longest, when it comes to life expectancy, changing colors puts male birds at a competitive disadvantage because that vibrant hue also attracts predators. As a result, according to researchers at Monash University, male fairy-wrens in blue mode have learned to be super cautious. Compared to their brown flock mates, they spend more time foraging for food in hiding and they’re the first birds out of the bush in response to alarm calls—file those adaptive risk avoidance skills under survival of the bluest.

The littlest birds sing the prettiest songs:
In the avian world, males commonly sing more frequently and produce more complex songs to attract mates. However, superb fairy-wrens are equal opportunity vocalists. Both males and females sing solo year-round and tutor their sons and daughters in familial trills, twitters, and tweets. Have a listen.

And with those songbird snippets, we wrap up the 2021 Australian Bird Of The Year competition. To celebrate all of this year’s contestants, author and illustrator Georgia Angus has created a downloadable poster for your viewing pleasure. It’s free, it’s beautiful, and you can get it here. A hearty congratulations to the superb fairy-wren! Don’t despair, tawny frogmouth—you’ll get another chance to strut your feathered stuff in 2022.

Just a reminder: the southern hemisphere’s best-in-bird competitions continue with Forest & Bird’s New Zealand Bird of the Year, from October 18 through October 31. At the moment, we’re leaning toward the rockhopper penguin, but the royal spoonbill is pretty darn hard to resist. Hmm, and what about the southern brown kiwi… It’s a veritable bird watchers paradise down there!

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Lisa S. French October 9, 2021

Sights, Sounds, and Sorrows

1.5-minute read

American Forests Has a Brand New Tree
The needs of the social and environmental movements are ever-changing, and our tree-planting partner, American Forests, is evolving to meet the transcendent challenges of a world in flux. They’ve unveiled a new logo representing their critical work protecting and regenerating forests to slow climate change and advance social equity for you—for your health, your safety, your right to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and enjoy nature in all its glory. To lead the charge, American Forests’ mission is rooted in unity, hope, growth, and progress. Yeah, we’re on board with that!

Holy Salmon Supper! It’s Fat Bear Week
The brown fisher bears of Katmai National Park are doubling down on the all-you-can-eat salmon buffet this week in preparation for their long winter’s nap. It’s time to get to know the chomp-happy contenders and place your bets on the bear most likely to achieve maximum pre-hibernation plump-i-tude. You can follow their fish acquisition progress live, courtesy of the Explore.org bear cams. Btw, our money is on protective mama bear, Grazer—she’s got a salmon-conquering look about her.

Bear Weight Update – Oct. 5: The winner of the Fat Bear Week 2021 salmon scarfing contest is four-time champion, Otis. The quarter-century-old king of the catch may be less spry than some of his younger competitors, but what he lacks in speed, he makes up for in strategy. How Otis abides: Be one with the water and let the fish come to you. Congratulations, big fella—sleep well!

Gorillas, Fireflies, Wildebeests, Oh, My!
The Nature Conservancy has announced the winners of the 2021 Global Photo Contest, and they’re brilliant. You can explore the striking images of some of the most precious inhabitants, and awe-inspiring aspects of our planet right here.

Música Natura Sonora
Shika Shika, the global artists collective, is back with a new album that pays homage to the “immensity, beauty, and mystery” of the natural world. Have a listen to the Latin American rhythms of Natura Sonora by El Búho. And be sure to keep your eyes peeled and ears open for A Guide to the Birdsong of Western Africa coming in 2022.

The Songs of City Crickets
We decided to do a little Earth-music sampling of our own, but where to go for nature sounds in NYC? We were pleased to discover that you can actually hear courtyard crickets in the city that never sleeps—from honk, honk, honk to chirp, chirp, chirp. Aah—the sweet songs of New York bugs! If you can make nature music here, you can make it anywhere.

Ivory-Billed Woodpecker: Officially Gone Forever
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service made a particularly sorrowful announcement this week—the proposed addition of 23 American animals and plants to the growing list of extinct species, the largest group added to that category since the inception of the Endangered Species Act in 1973.

One of the most lamentable losses was the Ivory-billed woodpecker. Although scientists held out hope that the elusive bird, which had not been seen for over 70 years, had managed to survive in hiding, it has officially been determined that America’s largest woodpecker, dubbed the “Lord God Bird,” has disappeared from the planet. There is no greater grief-inducing declaration in the natural world than gone forever. Farewell, beautiful one—we’re sorry that we failed you.

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Lisa S. French October 1, 2021