Night hangs over the Hoopa Valley Reservation. Stars spill toward the evergreen horizon as Mark Higley, a wildlife biologist for the Hoopa Valley Tribe, places a speaker on an unpaved road. Soon a recorded bird call—Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?—tumbles down the Northern California valley. A few minutes later, the faintest […]
Tag: Spotted Owl
Lawsuit Launched to Overturn Trump Administration’s Denial of Protection to California Spotted Owls
SAN FRANCISCO— Conservation groups filed a formal notice today of their intent to sue the Trump administration over its failure to protect California spotted owls under the Endangered Species Act. In November 2019 the Trump U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service determined that the spotted owl population is declining and likely to be wiped out from […]
These six species are about to be sacrificed for the oil and gas industry
Republicans in the western United States have been trying to whittle away the Endangered Species Act (ESA) since Donald Trump took office. Under new proposals, wildlife managers would limit protections for species designated as “threatened” (a level below endangered), consider the economic costs prior to defending a species, and de-emphasize long-term threats such as climate […]
Andaman Islands and Western Ghats
30th November – Today we had a lie-in and were up at 05:45, packed our bags and headed to Port Blair Airport for our flight to Chenai landing at 10:45. We then had a 2.5 hour stop-over in Chennai before our 13:30 flight to Coimbatore. We landed in Coimbatore, tamil Nadu at 14:45 gathered our […]
Creative twist
This post is about colour. I am in between wildlife trips so I thought it would be interesting to play around with the colour in some of my wildlife images. Rather than change the colour of the subject, I wanted to see what effect it would create if I removed the background colour. Presumably, it […]
Is ‘Baiting’ an ethical way to photograph wild owls?
Owls make for stunning photography subjects thanks to their unique appearance and air of perpetual astonishment, but they’re also the source of a hot debate in the wildlife photography community. The main point of contention? “Baiting,” or the practice of putting out mice or other treats to draw the birds of prey closer. I first […]
Kaziranga explosion
I have a lot of catching up to do, after several wifi-less days in Kaziranga NP, Assam. Our first day in the reserve was incredible. The weather was good, the birds were active and we just saw so many birds. Our guide, Rofikul, did a great job and our daily score was over 170 species! […]
The biologist terrifying the US Forest Service, timber and forest fire-fighting industries
Monica Bond is a wildlife biologist who has spent the past 15 years becoming an expert on spotted owls and forest fires. Earlier this month, she published a paper summarizing all existing science about what happens to spotted owls when forests burn, in the hope of averting a major US forest management policy mistake. The […]