Seeing people shoot raptors in other countries is fucking wild to me because we have a whole system of super strict laws governing how you can handle an individual FEATHER off of an eagle, and it doesn’t have to even be a dead eagle. One can molt and you can find it on the ground and if you’re caught with it the warden will fuck your entire life. What do you mean people are out there shooting them to protect a fucking pheasant. A pheasant??? That thing I have to avoid running over approximately 459 times any time I leave a major highway???
My good friend @prismaticate has asked a very good question here, and while I’m not entirely sure I’m qualified to explain it and would love some input from more qualified sources, my SUPER simplified understanding of why the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and its numerous modern revisions and addendums have clauses about this included is this:
-It’s basically impossible to tell a feather that’s been picked up off the ground from one that’s been taken from a poached bird
-This used to be a MAJOR problem when bird-feather hats and the like were in high demand back in the day, because several bird species on the edge of extinction kept getting poached in spite of the new laws protecting them since people would just say they “found” any feathers from protected species used in the stuff they were selling, and you couldn’t prove otherwise unless you literally caught them in the act of poaching
-This eventually got SO bad that they had to just make it illegal to have the feathers at all, with certain exceptions made for members of different indigenous groups, or authorized organizations that display them as part of efforts to educate the public about the species they belong to
@zooophagous is this a reasonable rundown? Was there anything I missed/any better sources you might recommend to learn more about this? I know it’s probably far more nuanced than that, but this was kind of the explanation I’d always seen floating around. 😅
That’s pretty much the gist of it! Eagles and eagle feathers have more laws on top of that because of their sacred uses in certain indigenous practices, how they relate to legal falconry, and because eagles at one time were highly endangered while at the same time being a national symbol. Where a cop or a game warden may shrug and look the other way if you, say, illegally picked up a chickadee feather from your bird feeder, if they see a real eagle feather they will notice and will be VERY interested in where it came from.
Not long ago here someone was arrested and charged for violating these laws because they tried to sell a plains feather bonnet at a pawn shop, claiming they had “found it while exploring an abandoned house.”
The clerk suspected it was real eagle, the warden confirmed it was, and because those feathers are so tightly tracked they were able to locate the family of the previous owners who said the item had been stolen some time ago.
If nobody knows you have it, obviously you can get away with it. But if they see it, or God forbid you try to SELL it, the hammer will fall.
Im surprised every time people think it’s a crazy sounding law, it is genuinely one of the only things preventing a lot of native birds from extinction or any asshole could kill as many as they want and just say they found them on the ground
not-so-friendly reminder that hunting is an important part of conservation in many cases and that painting all hunting as morally, ethically, and/or environmentally “bad” does a major disservice to indigenous people, poor communities, and our environment
Conservation biologists actually work with hunters (and fishers) a lot in monitoring species health! Hunters will often know before anyone else when numbers are declining, have a vested interest in keeping the population around, and are often involved in research collaborations where they bring their kills in to be measured/have tissue taken for research.
There can be tension when restrictions conflict with the need to make rent, and trophy hunters are not included in this (going after only the largest members of a population and not even using the body for food is pretty bad for conservation). But hunters and conservationists can be, and should be, natural allies.
The Minnesota DNR has had a program for the last several years where they work with hunters to track Chronic Wasting Disease (a rather nasty neurological disease caused by prions) in local white-tailed deer populations, just as a single example!
Really really REALLY wanna emphasize one of the points no one’s boosting here, that a firm anti-hunting stance is INHERENTLY ANTI-NATIVE. Please don’t forget that these policies are extremely racist towards our already extremely marginalized communities.
as a huge lover of birds, 90% of the concern against wind turbines being used for energy is literally just pro fossil fuel propaganda. birds ARE at a risk however there is a lot of strategies even as simple as painting one of the blades that reduces a lot of accidental deaths. additionally renewable energy sources will do more in favor of the environment that would positively impact birds (and all of us). one study found over one million bird deaths from wind turbines. while that is a shockingly high number and we should work to drastically shrink it, at least 1.3 billion birds die to outdoor cats on a yearly basis. it was never about caring about birds
The study also estimates cats kill between 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually, and this is JUST in the united states. Many other countries, like my own, have native fauna that are similarly (or more) vulnerable to domestic cats.
Also don’t forget that, while cats are the highest cause of bird fatality in most places, right behind them are building windows and cars. They’re in turn followed by powerlines, communication towers and agrichemicals before it even gets to wind turbines. The exact order will differ depending on the country the study is in, but it is largely the same story everywhere.
The point being, if the same people decrying wind turbines are also not calling for an end to cats, cars, infrastructure and pesticides, it’s not about the birds.
Okay something that bothers me is the fact physics is seen as the more prestigious of the three main sciences, with biology at the bottom and chemistry in the middle. Like. I doubt most people could name a famous biologist, but they could name 5 famous physicists. Why are Albert Einstein and Stephen hawking household names but Norman Borlaug and Jonas Salk aren’t?
Not to dismiss the accomplishments of Einstein or Hawking, or their genius, but their actual tangible contributions to society have been miniscule compared to that of Borlaug or Salk who have each saved LITERALLY hundreds of millions, if not billions, of lives each. Half the food on your plate was probably grown thanks to Borlaug and Salk is the reason half your siblings didn’t die of polio as a kid.
Sure Einsteins theory of relatively is important for modern satellite communications but really though how can it compare?
This is coming from someone who studied physics. I love physics, and years ago when i was at uni I looked down at biology and so did everyone else studying physics. And I know others did too. Retroactively of course I know this was so very wrong.
If society as a whole started treating biology with more respect then maybe more students would go into that field. If we had rockstars of medicine and agricultural science that were household names rather than just physicists? think of how many more lives could be saved, how many more lives could be improved.
I’m not saying physics isn’t important, and more scientists of any kind is always good, but proportionally I think societies priorities are a little skewd.
I lent my mom a book before I read it and apparently right at the beginning they tell a true story about all our chestnut trees dying and it made my mother SO DEPRESSED that she couldn’t sleep and now she’s been researching chestnut trees for the past half hour looking sick
She’s right!!
Chestnut trees used to define forests in the South – some estimates say about ¼ trees was a chestnut tree. And they were huge! Growing more than 100 feet tall (with trunks more than 10 feet in diameter), they were called the “redwoods of the East.” They were a characteristic food source of the South, too. A mature chestnut tree can produce upwards of 50 lbs of nuts a year – many of these were gathered and eaten by poor families, or turned into chestnut flour and used to make “poor man’s bread.”
But, at the beginning of the 20th century, a fungus called the blight was brought over from Asia. Over the next 50 years, every single American Chestnut was infected and died. While some root systems are still alive, they’re considered functionally extinct.
People cut down huge areas of forest trying to prevent the spread of the blight and save the trees – but they failed. And now several generations have never even known the chestnut tree. We don’t even know enough to miss them.
But now, with advances in genetic technology, the chestnut trees may be coming back! Through a group scientific effort led by the American Chestnut Foundation, researchers have created a “transgenic American chestnut tree with enhanced blight tolerance” called Darling 58. Darling 58 is genetically modified to be able to coexist with the blight.
Darling 58 American chestnuts are currently being reviewed by the USDA-APHIS, EPA, and FDA. But researchers hope to be able to reintroduce them soon – one huge step towards restoring our forests.
You can follow the chestnut trees’ progress (and request a Darling 58 tree when they’re available) at https://acf.org/ .
Thank you I’m gonna share this chestnut revitalization news with her!
There are many American chestnut trees still living outside their original natural range. Michigan, for example, has a large number of chestnut farms and is the biggest grower of chestnuts in the US. The species is listed as endangered but is not extinct.
Where I grew up is considered oak/hickory forest now but was once oak/chestnut. Even the corpses of the chestnuts are gone now. It’s a wood that takes a long time to decay and there was at least one fallen trunk still somewhat recognizable when I was a kid, but it too is just a mossy spot now. We’re still seeing the impact of the loss on local wildlife.
If Darling 58 gets approved I’m going to have to see how many we can plant on the property.
*waves* I work at the university where Darling 58 was developed, and we’re all really excited about it!
The devastation of losing the American chestnut can’t be overstated. It was a keystone part of eastern North American forests, providing nuts for wildlife, leaves and wood for many specialized herbivorous insects, and was a vital source of pollen for bees, beetles, butterflies, and other pollinators during mid-summer - a time when there are few other flowering plants in forests. Not to mention many other aspects I myself don’t know much about, such as their mycorrhizal networks, which I’m sure were quite important.
I mention that last bit specifically because I study pollinators, and my latest research is surveying pollinators in American chestnut orchards to better understand the importance of this tree for insects. Because the loss of the tree happened so long ago (not in ecological terms but for peer-reviewed science) we don’t really have the ability to do before-after comparisons, just after. Chestnut orchards are really all we have to get a tiny glimpse into how these trees interacted with other species. There’s even a specialized chestnut bee, Andrena rehni, that only collects pollen from chestnuts and chinkapins, which was thought to have gone extinct for decades after the loss of chestnut. It was rediscovered only around a decade ago, and has since been found in a few chestnut orchards.
Oaks, which are also keystone species, have largely replaced chestnuts in eastern forests, filling their empty niche, but they’re not the same. Undoubtedly the dynamics of forest ecosystems have been greatly impacted in ways that are hard to quantify. Yes, you can still find American chestnuts growing in the wild - the vast majority are not at mature age, as the blight kills them back, and they will continue to stump sprout over and over. I am from New Hampshire and our woods are full of little chestnuts that are maybe up to 3cm DBH and won’t ever produce nuts. Naturally blight resistant mature chestnuts are exceedingly rare and their locations are often hidden to protect them. The ones you see in orchards are usually Chinese chestnuts, or American x Chinese backcrossed hybrids, which was the previous method of breeding blight resistance.
We have a growing number of invasive pathogens threatening our native trees - hemlock woolly adelgid, emerald ash borer, Dutch elm disease, oak wilt, and more it seems every year. The entire dynamics of our eastern forests are at risk of fundamental change, as the composition and diversity of woodlands are impacted by these exotic diseases. There are countless researchers studying and trying to develop ways to fight them, but it’s happening far too fast to prevent some significant losses. Ecosystems that have been evolving together since the last Ice Age are unraveling in our lifetimes, and I can’t stress how important it is for you to remember.
Remember chestnuts. Remember ash forests. While we’re at it, remember wolves and mountain lions, remember ivory-billed woodpeckers and passenger pigeons and Carolina parakeets and Atlantic cod. So many species that were fundamental parts of North America but have either gone extinct or become just about functionally extinct across most of their range.
Do not let shifting baselines make you think what you see now is normal.
We have to remember that things are deeply wrong. Most of the green you see on roadside and forest edges are invasive vines and shrubs. There aren’t supposed to be this many deer and deer ticks. Cowbirds once lived on the Great Plains, now they’re parasitizing birds across the US to the level of being a true threat to the survival of some endangered species. Atlantic cod was once so abundant they jumped into fishermen’s boats. And don’t even get me started on the decline in so many insect groups - the abundance of all kinds of insects used to be exponentially greater. We used to be surrounded by a wealth of biodiversity and life. Despair and grieve momentarily at how mutilated this land is, but then get your hands in the dirt and do something about it.
When Darling 58s become available for the public, plant one. In the meantime, plant other native trees, and native wildflowers, native shrubs, native ferns. Read some books on our native ecosystems - there’s thousands of them out there, whether you are interested in pollinators, raptors, salmon, squirrels, saltmarshes, you name it, ecologists have written books about them, or field guides, to try and get the public motivated to care and help restore them. Start noticing as many species as you can on your next walk, including the invasive ones. Learn to read the landscape, so instead of one big wall of green you see individual species, instead of a white noise of birdsong you pick out the conversations of orioles, vireos, sparrows, and warblers.
The most that ecologists can ask you to do is to care. If most people just cared, let alone took action or better yet became a conservation biologist, we’d be in a much different scenario. But the majority of people are indifferent, ignorant, or are in the case of corporations actively working to destroy. Anyone can restore habitat, if done thoughtfully and with the right native species. You can transform your backyard, or help redesign a town park, or work with your local garden club or conservation commission to get native plants installed in front of buildings instead of more hostas and daylilies. It’s not happening because no one’s demanding it, and few know enough to demand it. Destruction will keep happening until there’s pushback against it, ignorance will remain until eyes are opened to other ways of being.
We can bring chestnuts back. We can bring many things back from the brink, so in a few hundred years they will perform the ecological roles they once did. Nature is resilient. Your actions today determine the ecosystems of tomorrow, and all the things that ecosystems do for us, from mitigating hurricane damage to clean drinking water to carbon storage to food production.
Want some books to get started?
Read ’Bringing Nature Home’ by Doug Tallamy, or his latest book, ‘Nature’s Best Hope.’ Or, if you want to revel in the awesomeness of oak trees, his book 'The Nature of Oaks.’
Read anything by Bernd Heinrich or Thor Hansson, who will make you feel connected to this land like you never have before.
You can find books about the biggest trees in New England, birding guides for each state that tell you where the best places are and what to find there. You can find natural history encyclopedias for most states too - for example, 'The Nature of New Hampshire,’ 'Natural Landscapes of Maine’, 'Wetland, Woodland, Wildland’ (for VT), and I’m sure many others, all of which are detailed accounts of every type of natural community that occurs in each state.
Want to learn how to 'read the landscape’ like I mentioned? For the northeast, get 'Reading the Forested Landscape’ by Tom Wessels. It’s so good it was assigned as a textbook in my undergrad at UNH. I’m sure there are many similar books for the mid-Atlantic or southeast.
Seriously, just, go to the natural history section of your local bookstore or library. I could list a bajillion websites here with resources that are fantastic, but I argue it’s far more valuable to sit down with a book and get immersed in a narrative that will move you spiritually. There’s still so much information that’s only found in books, or is collected there in ways that you’d have to go searching all over the internet for, without the assurance it’s even accurate.
Change the way you see this land; notice the absences, the new arrivals, the things that are slowly blinking out and becoming a ghost of eons past, the things that are changing before our very eyes. Connect the dots through time, and see your place in it too.
The best time to plant a tree was yesterday; the next best time is when you can get your hands on a Darling 58.
Also, I want to add, if you’re interested in these sorts of projects, check with your state Department of Natural Resources (or Department of Conservation, even Game Commisions can have resources) - they may have all sorts of guides to native plants, or even programs to assist (and Certification programs if you want a cute sign).
I know specifically Maryland DNR has the Wild Acres program, but other states have their own programs as well.
caught the tail end of a radio commercial for a regional aquarium and it said “do it for the gelatinous zooplankton” and that’s who we’re living for today friends
Foraging has become a REALLY hot topic over the past few years. We even saw a surge of interest at the start of the pandemic fueled both by the shutdown, and by concerns about food security due to grocery shortages. My foraging classes are consistently the most popular ones I offer, and the Facebook groups I’m on are absolutely teeming with new people interested in getting started.
But as with any extractive activity, foraging has its downsides. The more people out in the woods and fields looking for edible mushrooms (and plants), the more strain that puts on local ecosystems. In my classes I advocate for only taking 25% of a given species in an area (unless you find, like, three chanterelles, in which case just pick the three chanterelles.) A lot of people have less restraint, and of course you have commercial mushroom hunters who will clean out every single marketable mushroom they find, leaving nothing for anyone else.
This is a topic that I don’t feel gets enough attention in the foraging world, but we desperately need to be talking about it more. Most of us who forage do not rely on it as a primary form of food security, and have other reasonable options for acquiring food. Yes, it can be fun to go out looking for mushrooms and berries and such when we’re out hiking and camping, and I am a big fan of what I call “incidental foraging”–picking things you find while you’re doing something else. It’s good to know how to identify edible and it’s a nice treat when I run across something. But unless my situation changes to where my food security is seriously threatened, I do not personally feel the need to be one of those foragers where 90% of what they eat is something they foraged, especially when I am financially secure enough to be able to go to the grocery store whenever I want. I think most foragers these days are in a similar situation, though there are always going to be people for whom foraging is a necessary and vital part of food security.
So yes, I am strongly in favor of bag limits for non-indigenous people, and curbs on widespread commercial mushroom harvest. It’s not just to save something for other people, but to reduce wear and tear on the land. Those mushrooms need to be spreading spores for the next generation, and I worry that overharvesting is going to have deleterious effects both on the mushroom species being harvested, and the health of the ecosystems they are a part of.
ALT
