Innehållsförteckning för Winter 2020 från Audubon Magazine

The high Arctic is dangerous in the dark of winter. Temperatures drop to–40 degrees. Ice cracks underfoot. Polar bears roam. Yet scientists on the Alfred Wegener Institute’s MOSAiC expedition braved these hazards so they could study the Arctic atmosphere for a full year. They have urgent questions about why the region is warming faster than elsewhere on Earth, and clouds may be key. “Clouds are one of the leading sources of uncertainty in our models,” says expedition co-coordinator Matthew Shupe with the University of Colorado and NOAA. So in October 2019 the Polarstern icebreaker was locked into the frozen ocean near the North Pole and left to drift as scientists sampled the sea, ice, and atmosphere. The data will yield insights into the Arctic’s cloud cycle and a sharper picture…

AS THIS ISSUE OF AUDUBON goes to press, the election is just wrapping up—with the exception of a couple of runoff elections like those for the Senate seats in Georgia. People are rising up to demand action on climate change and racial equity. And birds are telling us there is no time to lose. We need bold, equitable, and durable action on climate. That’s why Audubon’s 1.9 million members are helping to lead this movement. Rural and urban, progressive and conservative, Black college students and white grandparents all agree that everyone, regardless of race or ethnicity, should have equal access to clean air and water and feel safe and welcome in the outdoors. The tone of the recent election season put a spotlight on the deep divisions in our nation.…

THE DISTINCTIVE RUBBER DUCKY squeak of the Brown-headed Nuthatch can once more be heard in Missouri’s Ozarks. The tiny songbird, an energetic brown, white, and gray-blue acrobat that flits from tree to tree, was extirpated from the state in the early 1900s as loggers felled millions of acres of shortleaf pine woodlands and land managers suppressed the natural wildfires that burned through these areas. Nuthatches lost nesting sites—they typically excavate cavities in dead trees—and found the hard oaks and hickories that replaced pines didn’t provide a hearty winter diet. It’s unlikely nuthatches would have made the 300-mile trek themselves. Nearly a hundred years later, Midwestern conservationists spearheaded sizable efforts to restore the historic landscape. They thinned out overplanted hardwoods, reintroduced prescribed fires, and seeded pines in Mark Twain National Forest…

A geyser of dust engulfs the tires of Karl Miller’s silver pickup as the truck comes to an abrupt stop on a narrow dirt trail. Dodging the outstretched jazz hands of palmettos and the tangle of scrub on both sides, he slowly opens the back door to unload two soft, mailbox-size carriers covered with a bedsheet. Each contains precious cargo: a single Florida Scrub-Jay that Miller collected in the predawn gray from Ocala National Forest, just north of Orlando, and drove four hours south to Jonathan Dickinson State Park, an 18-square-mile coastal preserve near Palm Beach. The bonded pair in his truck are valuable not only because they’re among a shrinking number of Florida’s lone endemic bird species, but also because Miller has hand-selected them, along with a few other…

LATE ONE SUMMER EVENING, JUST AS THE DAY’S monsoon rains receded, a 68-year-old activist named Robin Silver climbed through a barbed-wire fence outside Tombstone, Arizona. He was headed for a riverbend near the site of a ghost town locals know as Charleston. It had taken Silver most of the afternoon to cover the short distance from the nearest road, his path obstructed by pools and clots of dislodged cottonwoods—evidence of the season’s capricious flash floods. At the bend, Silver stopped and peered up- and downstream. Beyond him in both directions ran the San Pedro River, its banks a ribbon of greenery unfurling gently through the red desert. “This is where the Charleston Dam site was,” Silver said. “Where it would have gone across.” Commissioned in the late 1960s as part…

Acknowledgment For centuries before the first colonizers arrived, Indigenous people across the Western Hemisphere developed deep relationships with the land they lived on and the animals they shared it with. In celebration of Native American Heritage Month, this November we published a series of online essays and stories that feature Indigenous people from North America and their cultural connections with birds, past and present. One of those pieces, “The Tale of Chipilo Crisopario,” can be found on page 18 of this issue. To read the rest of these stories, please visit audubon.org/indigenous. Fall 2020 I’m so impressed with the excellence of your Fall 2020 issue! Not only is it beautiful page after page, but the editorial staff shows such sensitivity—to the bird species, of course, but also to many of…

MARIA DE LOS ANGELES Azuara couldn’t hold back tears when she heard two dozen children singing at a small school in the Mexican state of Chiapas. Guided by their music teacher, the elementary students performed a song they had adapted about a new friend, a young Golden-cheeked Warbler named Chipilo who lived in the same mountains they did. He connected them, they sang, with “the only world that can cover us both / the world in which we all live.” The children sang in Spanish, the second language of their Tsotsil Mayan community. It was 2015, and Azuara and colleagues had been working with 28 teachers from several Indigenous schools in Chiapas for a few months. As the environmental education program director at the nonprofit Pronatura Sur, her job was…

DEEP READERS OF THE VISIONARYnovelist Toni Morrison appreciate the significance of birds in her work—they show up everywhere in her illustrious canon. I had the great fortune of experiencing how she treasured them every day. I met Morrison in 2016 when I interviewed her for two days for Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, a film about her art and life released last year. A few months later she invited me to visit with her at her home, an enchanted boathouse along the Hudson River where a ghost named Beloved visited and where she wrote and dreamed until her passing in 2019. On the calendar, our friendship was fleeting. Spiritually, the bond endures. When I visited Morrison, birds somehow winged their way into our conversation, and we’d spend precious moments…

WHEN TONY GOLDBERG RECEIVED AN exuberant, enigmatic text message—“You gotta come into the lab!”—the epidemiologist turned his car around and headed straight back to his office at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He found his postdoc, Sam Sibley, transfixed by the computer monitor. Sibley had just finished running blood serum from a long-dead Bald Eagle through a powerful machine that searches out all traces of genetic material. Comparing the results to a database of all the world’s known viruses, the computer had spit back a surprising match. Peering at the screen, Goldberg realized the viral code displayed before him was something completely new. Bizarrely, it appeared to be a relative of human hepatitis C, an infectious disease that causes liver damage. At the time, in 2017, a virus of this…

ON A FRIDAY IN OCTOBER, AN eight-week-old Common Loon glides back and forth, ready for lunch. When a researcher pours wriggling fish through a chute into its enclosure, she dives and nabs one after another, barely surfacing. In a pen nearby, a second waits a turn. The youngsters look right at home, but they’ve traveled a long way. Born in Maine, they were brought to Massachusetts weeks after hatching—the latest recruits in an effort by the Biodiversity Research Institute (BRI) to return this species to its historic range. Loons were once an iconic presence in the state’s glacial lakes. “They were a natural nester here,” says Andrew Vitz, state ornithologist at the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. In 1854’s Walden, Henry David Thoreau recounts playing hide-and-seek with the bird—its…

THE SUN SHINES MEEKLY through a veil of morning fog and wildfire smoke while several figures in orange vests, hard hats, and face masks move slowly through a marsh on the north shore of San Francisco Bay. Wielding brooms, they jab lightly at the vegetation, ruffling the tufts of native pickleweed. As biological monitors, their job is to flush out small animals—especially the endangered salt marsh harvest mouse—and usher them from the path of a rumbling excavator, which is about to dig a deep groove in the slick mud. It’s early October at the mouth of Sonoma Creek, where an unusual conservation project that broke ground five years ago is nearing the finish line. Audubon California and partner agencies are turning what was once a 400-acre stagnant backwater into a…

2021 Audubon photography Awards TAKE YOUR BEST SHOT! Enter the Audubon Photography Awards. You could win cash prizes and see your photo published in Audubon magazine. CONTEST ENTRY DATES January 13–April 7, 2021 PRIZE CATEGORIES Grand, Amateur, Professional, Youth, Plants for Birds, and Fisher Prize New this year: Video and Female Bird prizes! SPECIAL YOUTH PRIZE Six days at the Hog Island Audubon Camp in Maine JUDGES INCLUDE Founders of the Galbatross Project, a group of bird experts focused on highlighting female birds Sean Graesser, biologist and conservation photographer/videographer Allen Murabayashi, chairman and co-founder, PhotoShelter Tara Tanaka, wildlife photographer/videographer Jason Ward, Chief Diversity Officer, American Bird Conservancy No purchase necessary. Contest begins 1/13/21 and ends 4/7/21. Must be at least 13 years of age and a legal resident of the…