Opinion: Donald Trump Is (Not) For The Birds

In the last few days there has been a seismic change in the way the United States deals with climate change.

It is ignoring it.

Here is the reporting of the New York Times:

President Trump announced [Thursday] afternoon that he was officially erasing the scientific finding that greenhouse gases threaten human life by warming the planet. The move largely cuts off the federal government’s legal authority to address climate change through regulation.

Following the lead of a president who refers to climate change as a “hoax,” the administration is directly challenging the overwhelming scientific consensus. Presidents of both parties have warned of the dangers of climate change for decades.

At issue is a 2009 determination called the endangerment finding, which the government has used to justify regulations on greenhouse gases. Lee Zeldin, who leads the [Environmental Protection Agency], called today’s move “the single largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.”

The administration claimed it would save auto manufacturers and other businesses an estimated $1 trillion, although it has declined to explain how it arrived at that figure. The Environmental Defense Fund estimated the rollback could lead to as many as 58,000 premature deaths.

(Alen Hunjet, StockPhotoBoard.com)

What Trump did, according to the BBC, was revoke the Obama-era "endangerment finding" that held that pollution harms public health and the environment. For almost 17 years, the U.S. has used that scientific finding as the legal basis to establish policies to reduce emissions from cars, power plants and other sources of planet-warming gases.

"This radical rule became the legal foundation for the Green New Scam," Trump said, using a term popular with Republicans for describing Democratic environmental and climate policies.

So 58,000 early human deaths caused by an increasingly warmer planet where we've been having hotter summers, more widespread drought and more destructive hurricanes is a "green new scam." 

As an American who loves her country, I hate this radical change by a man who has no regard for anything except his own ego and making a few million bucks for his companies while in office. But as a birder, I am extremely saddened and worried about what will happen to the environment, especially the birds, now that fighting climate change is no longer an American imperative. 

As the oceans warm, the creatures that need to live in cold water have been moving north. So have the birds, whales and fish that feed on them. As icebergs melt, the oceans will continue to rise and threaten coastal communities. That includes my hometown of New York City.

Spring will come earlier. According to Roger F. Pasquier, in his book "Birds in Winter": "While short-distance migrants are leaving their wintering site sooner and returning there later, long-distance migrants, affected by day length, have not shifted their schedule as much. On arrival in spring, however, they find the season more advanced, often to the point where the food they give their young is no longer widely available. Resident birds in the same habitat have begun nesting weeks earlier, remaining in sync with the emergence of the prey they feed their young. The migrants least able to accelerate their schedule are the species most declining."

This was written in 2019.

Birds and animals that once lived in southern regions, such as the red-bellied woodpecker and the northern mockingbird, have been living in the north for years. Armadillos native to Central and South America are now moving beyond the American south, where they could be warm and find lots of insects to eat, to the warming midwest.

Says Pasquier: "The most visible impact of climate change in wintering birds has been the shift in their range. Many species of middle latitudes are migrating less far, if at all, and their range in both winter and summer has moved poleward. Ground foragers can now survive the winter in places where snow cover used to make feeding difficult. Waterbirds are not limited by areas that once froze for months of winter..."

President Trump has done many things to harm many people since he was re-elected in 2024, and he is not much better when it comes to Nature. He wants oil drilling in the arctic. He wants oil drilling off America's coasts. He tried to scuttle wind power projects. He ordered the Defense Department to use more coal-based electricity. He has ordered the Energy Department to pay coal plants to stay online. He has proposed major changes to the Endangered Species Act to eliminate many protections. Once he was re-elected he again pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Accords on climate change. (He did this during his first term, in 2017, but President Biden reinstated the U.S. in 2021.)

His way to "Make America Great Again" seems to be all about making America a sick place where businesses can operate unregulated and with impunity and Nature is a profit center, the rest of the world and all that live in it be damned. 

Even NASA, a part of the U.S. government, recognizes the seriousness of climate change.

There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate. Human activity is the principal cause.

Earth-orbiting satellites and new technologies have helped scientists see the big picture, collecting many different types of information about our planet and its climate all over the world. These data, collected over many years, reveal the signs and patterns of a changing climate.

Europe has been taking climate change seriously, because it is the fastest-warming area on Earth. But the relationship between Europe and the U.S. has been changing under Trump. Besides pulling the U.S. out of the climate accord he has threatened to take the U.S. out of NATO and has been obsessed with controlling Greenland, a protectorate of NATO member Denmark.

Ironically, climate change is causing Greenland's ice sheet to melt at an accelerated rate, leading to rising sea levels and having an impact on local ecosystems and communities. The warming temperatures also threaten traditional livelihoods, particularly for the Inuit population, as fish stocks decline.

Trump does not care about any of that. He does not care about ecosystems and communities. He does not care about Inuits or fish. He claims he needs Greenland to protect the U.S. from potential threats from China and Russia. What he really wants, I believe, are the rare earth metals needed for technology, which Greenland has in abundance and the U.S. is no longer getting from China.

In a word, sad.

Then and Now

Nature abhors a vacuum. Clear land and do nothing with it and soon things will grow. If they are plants you don't want, they are considered "invasives" and "weeds." If they are plants you do want, they are considered "natives."

The same is true if you have an area prone to flooding. It fills with water after heavy rains. If there are no trees around to shade the area, the area dries out and things start to grow.

Ice pond, 2017 (Margo D. Beller)

A perfect example of this is along the linear park near me known as Patriots Path.

In 2018, the county parks people were cutting down trees infested by emerald ash borers. As I discovered, a lot of ash trees were growing along Patriots Path and those trees were soon cut and strewn around like trash. (Eventually they were removed.)

When the spring rains were heavy, the nearby Whippany River would overflow its banks and spread through the woods, across the path and into this area that acted like a bowl. Even after the waters receded and the path was walkable again there would be water for weeks afterwards.

Pond once the trees started coming down, 2018.
(Margo D. Beller)

One spring I walked the path after it had dried and came upon nearly two dozen mallards (plus pairs of wood ducks and Canada geese) that were in the water that remained on either side. At my approach the water fowl slowly moved off toward the Whippany River.

This area I'm mentioning had been shaded by trees, many of which, as I learned, were ash trees. When the trees came down the area was more exposed to the sun. And then a very interesting thing happened.

The water was replaced by plants.

There were weeds, yes, including wild grape vines, Virginia creeper, the inevitable poison ivy and others I can't identify. But there were also things growing that I can identify - joe-pye weed, cardinal flowers and cattails. Joe-pye and cardinal bloom in the fall. They are very popular with pollenators including bees and hummingbirds, the latter of which have already begun migrating south for the winter. Unlike the invasive phragmites, cattails also provide pollen and are important to some species of birds. 

The former pond, 2025 (Margo D. Beller)

According to The Nature Conservancy: Yellow-headed and red-winged blackbirds, and marsh wrens perch and build their nests on them. Waterfowl, such as Mallards and Canada Geese, nest among them. Frogs and salamanders lay their eggs in the water on and between them. Fish hide or nest among them. Many birds use the seed fluff to line their nests. Muskrats use rhizomes for food and the foliage to build their houses. This then provides resting and nesting sites for water birds. Deer, raccoons, cottontails and turkeys use them as cover. Insects eat and live on them. 

In addition, I learned, all of the cattail is edible. 

Cattails (Margo D. Beller)

These are different from phragmites, which, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, form highly dense stands that quickly outcompete native plants, degrade large areas of highly productive wetlands, drastically reduce habitat diversity and function, impair human use of beaches and recreational areas, and negatively impacts dependent wildlife and a multi-billion-dollar regional fishery.

Thanks to the plants, any rainwater has been sucked up far faster than before. I have seen no ice ponds in years. 

Cardinal flower (Margo D. Beller)

For all I know, the county park commission had people put these native plants in the ground. Or the plants could've come from someone's nearby garden. Or the seeds, floating around in the air we breathe, fell in the right place at the right time.

However they got to this place they have made this walking path a much more colorful place.

Growing Concern

I like trees. I've written about my despair when they are cut down, including by me. But after a recent walk I had to wonder about the unintended consequences of planting some trees in a particular area.

Saplings, May 2023
(Margo D. Beller)

In the Central Park of Morris County not far from me a field was planted with tree saplings a number of years ago. All you could see were rows of protective tubing. In autumn 2021 I went for a walk in that area after a long absence and noticed the saplings had grown tall enough to be seen above the tubing.

The other week I went back and the saplings were even taller. I could now identify many of the trees including tulip poplars, maples, even at least one sweetgum. What happens when they all grow up, I wondered. Tulip poplars alone can grow 70 to 90 feet tall and have a 35- to 50-foot spread. It is also a fast-growing hardwood tree, which might explain why it was planted here.

Saplings, November 2021
(Margo D. Beller)

I can't remember exactly when Morris County put in the saplings. It could've been after hurricane Sandy blew through in 2012 and toppled trees in this field, once part of a working farm associated with the old Greystone hospital. The saplings could've been planted as part of the work the county did when it took over the land to turn it into a multi-use park.

The field in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2012,
which might be the reason more trees
were planted. (Margo D. Beller)

During that time, the old hospital buildings including the wards, the farm and the Kirkbride administration building came down. Old or damaged trees came down with them. (Many other trees that came down in a different area were neither sick nor damaged. They were in the way of a very large planned soccer field.) 

This old farm field usually draws a lot of birds depending on the season. In past years I've found different types of sparrows, warblers, vireos and thrushes. But now I have to wonder what will happen when the trees grow to their full height. The area is already changing. The grasses around the saplings have not been cut and have become very long and weedy. This is good for some birds but not for others. 

Once the trees have grown and darken the area it will change even more. Will there be more forest dwellers? Bird that look for insects or build nests in treetops? I fear the sparrows and other grassland birds that prefer wood edges to deep woods will go elsewhere. 

I'll just have to see what happens when those trees throw shade.

Dear President Biden:

Hello. Congratulations on your win. I hope you can achieve the unity you mentioned in your inaugural address. As you said, you have many crises on your plate, starting with the coronavirus and its devastating effect on the U.S. economy.

Normally I don't write letters to politicians. I am a bird watcher. But in the waning days of the Trump Administration, the outgoing president did more than pardon his cronies and others. He issued executive orders rolling back some of our long-held environmental regulations.

Mature bald eagle, threatened symbol of our land. (RE Berg-Andersson)

So now that you have issued your own executive order to get us back into the Paris climate accords, here are other Trump orders you should rescind as soon as possible.

An EPA rule that will allow major sources of hazardous air pollutants to reclassify themselves as less regulated "area sources" under the Clean Air Act, abandoning the "once-in, always-in" policy that had been in place for 25 years.

An EPA rule on greenhouse gas emission standards for airplanes that fails to adequately mitigate public health and environmental harms from such emissions, including the environmental justice impacts on residents living near airports, which disproportionately include disadvantaged minority and low-income communities.

An EPA rule maintaining the national ambient air quality standard (NAAQS) for ozone at a level that fails to protect public health and welfare based on the existing scientific evidence.

An EPA rule that will skew how the agency weighs the costs and benefits of rules under the Clean Air Act by excluding important public health benefits from the analysis while inflating the costs. In particular, the rule will cause future EPA rules to undercount the harmful effects of carbon emissions that lead to climate change and distort the value of "co-benefits," the often-substantial benefits of rules that addresses more than one pollutant.

An EPA rule weakening the Clean Air Act's new source review program for major modifications to existing major stationary sources of emissions. The rule will subject New Jersey residents to lower air quality and will make it more difficult for downwind States like New Jersey to attain or maintain federal air quality standards.

An EPA rule that unlawfully and arbitrarily limits the scientific evidence that the agency can consider when adopting rules and standards to protect human health and the environment.

A U.S. Department of Energy rule that will weaken federal energy efficiency standards for consumer appliances and industrial equipment by making it easier for manufacturers to obtain waivers from product testing requirements.

Rules from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service that will make it harder to protect endangered and threatened species by narrowly defining critical "habitat" and establishing a skewed process for excluding areas from critical habitat designations.

A rule from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that rolls back protections for migratory birds. 

These last two are the ones that most alarm me. The narrow definition of "habitat" has allowed Trump to open forests in the northwest U.S. to logging, threatening the northern spotted owl. Trump's order removing protections for migratory birds threatens, among others, the bald eagle, the symbol of this land. For this reason, 12 states filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York alleging this Trump orders violates the Endangered Species Act.

Martha, the last of the passenger pigeons (Smithsonian)

There are some people who believe what it says in the Bible, that man was given dominion over the animals, and use that as license to do what they want, including hunting some birds to extinction. Think of the birds no longer around - the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet - except in the paintings of John Jay Audubon. According to the environmental organization that took his name, over 300 birds are on the brink of extinction, as of 2019, before Trump's executive orders. This is all because of climate change, one of your many concerns. But without action, that number will surely rise.

When the coronavirus is a distant memory and people can walk outdoors unafraid and unmasked, I don't want to live in a world when I can no longer see warblers, herons, hawks or owls. Do you?

Please act now.

Thank you. 

Following New Jersey's Passaic River

This post is based on one that originally ran on August 5, 2015, on the blog of New Jersey Audubon's Scherman Hoffman sanctuary. The NJA blog was significantly overhauled since then and the archives were deleted. However, I was able to keep a copy so this can again see the light of day.

Recently, MH and I went to the Great Swamp. It is spring, and I wanted to see what might've been hanging around. I also wanted to get MH out and walking. I took him to a 0.6 mile loop toward the back of the property where the education center named for Helen Fenske is located. (Fenske led the call to keep the area a swamp rather than turn it into the New York metro area's fourth major airport.) This trail was flat and cindered so he could walk it easily.

Passaic River, Bernardsville, NJ, not far from the source. (Margo D. Beller)

I have been on it before and usually take the left fork. With MH we went right, and almost immediately were on the banks of the Passaic River, the natural border between Morris County, where we stood, and Somerset County on the other side.

While I scanned the banks for birds, MH voiced his amazement. "I never knew this was so close to the Fenske Center," he said. "I've lived in New Jersey almost all my life and never knew this was here." MH's nickname is Mr. Map because he uses (and collects) maps and is rarely ever lost, so finding a river someplace unexpected really threw him.

This happened once before, when I wrote a post for the NJ Audubon blog on the Passaic River. One of the Scherman Hoffman sanctuary trails goes along the river. One autumn day, driving to the place, I saw the river through the trees. When I got home I pulled out one of MH's detailed maps and realized that when I passed Liddell's Pond, I was passing the source. I showed MH the map and he was amazed. "I never knew that was the source," he said.

We both learned a lot from the post, as you'll see below:

Every river, even the mighty Mississippi, starts small. Water bubbles to the surface from underground and gravity brings it downhill. As it rains, the waters rise, the flow increases and brooks and streams are created. They feed larger water forms that have become rivers.

Before highways took us from Point A to B, New Jersey and the other original 13 colonies were wooded wilderness. It was hard traveling over the land so people and their goods got from one town to the other via river. If you remove the highways from a map of New Jersey and look at where the state's original towns were located, the importance of rivers becomes more obvious.

For a small state, there are many rivers, among them the Delaware on the state's western coast, the Hudson on the east and, within, the Raritan and the Hackensack.

What these rivers have in common, besides their importance in trade and transportation, is they are natural borders between states and counties.

The border between New Jersey's Morris and Somerset counties is the Passaic River. "Passaic," if you believe Wikipedia, is from the Lenape word "pahsayèk," which has been variously attributed to mean "valley" or "place where the land splits." There are many sources where you can learn more about the river's history, starting with the formation about 11,000 years ago of the Ice Age's Glacial Lake Passaic.

At 80 to 90 miles (depending on which source you use), the Passaic is one of the the longest rivers in New Jersey, starting in Mendham, Morris County, and ending up the much larger river that drops in a giant waterfall at Paterson and flows by Newark before emptying into New York Bay.

The river is very noticeable if you are walking Scherman's yellow-blazed River trail. At this point the Passaic is about the size of a large brook and filled with rocks. Water draws bugs, and the Passaic is no exception. Birders put up with this because bugs draw the birds that feed on them. The movement of the river draws flycatching phoebes and the Louisiana waterthrush, which have nested at Scherman for years.

Passaic River plants (Margo D. Beller)

The river ecosystem encourages such plants as trout lily, Canada mayflower, cinnamon ferns and skunk cabbage, one of the first plants to grow in spring. Rivers are a source of life.

I've heard the distinctive rattling of a belted kingfisher flying back and forth along the river looking for fish. The river provides birds and other creatures a place to bathe and feed. Families come to Scherman's part of the Passaic to sit on the shore and cool off during a hot summer day.

The part of the Passaic at Scherman is clean water. But the part at the Newark end is not and its tortured industrial history reminds us rivers can be killed quickly.

Many of suburban New Jersey's rivers are threatened by too many suburban houses and homeowners who over-treat their lawns with chemicals that not only kill beneficial insects but run off in heavy rains into storm sewers and from there to rivers.

That's nothing compared to the lower Passaic. If the upper Passaic is Dr. Jekyll, the lower Passaic is Mr. Hyde.

It has been a major chemical dumping ground for decades, filled with toxins that have hurt people living downriver. Paterson, for instance, was once known as the Silk City because of its mills. That was a long time ago. More recently it has been a byword for crime, urban decay and, thanks to its many now-closed factories, the creator of the "toilet river" that was the Passaic.

As a 2009 New York Times article put it: "The Passaic begins in the clear trout streams of rural Morris County, provides drinking water to 3.5 million New Jersey residents, reaches a peak at the Great Falls of Paterson and then devolves at the end of 80 increasingly foul and dispiriting miles into a dark, malodorous industrial sink."

Six years later I wouldn't eat any fish caught in Paterson.

(Margo D. Beller)

If you go to Scherman Hoffman to hike the trails you are what has become known as an ecotourist. It is a big business in some parts of the world. Towns in New Jersey have been catching up to the concept. The people running the cities and towns along the Passaic, whose people got sick from the chemicals in their air and water, have been literally trying to clean up their act, promoting ecotourism opportunities such as fishing, kayaking, and in the case of Paterson visiting the Great Falls, which only recently became a federal park.

Environmental groups have used the river as a teaching aid. The Hackensack Riverkeeper, for instance, within the last few years has run an ecotour that takes people up the urban end of the Passaic. As with their trips up the Hackensack - another river trying to recover from nearly being killed by industrial pollutants dumped into the Meadowlands marshes - the idea is to show the importance of the river and and how fragile the river's health is still.

Things are slowly improving for the lower Passaic, despite the long time it takes to get a polluting company to pay for river cleanup and government inefficiency.

At the upper Passaic, along the Scherman Hoffman River Trail, we don't have that problem -- at least not yet. It is easy to forget the clean, Dr. Jekyll, suburban one and the polluted, Mr. Hyde, urban one are the same river. But it is connected. The upper Passaic is healthy because its headwaters are not in an industrial area. But it wouldn't take much - say a farm sold to developers who build a massive condo development in a watershed, as many would like to do in the New Jersey Highlands - to do a lot of harm.

Rivers are fragile and their health shouldn't be taken for granted.

Return to Life and My Stand Against the Disposable Society

Every spring, when the worst of the cold is over and the snow has finally melted, I am amazed at what survives in my garden and saddened by what does not.

Despite neglect or doing something wrong out of ignorance, the perennials come back and I am both humbled and thankful.

The same is true for house plants. When I accept a house plant as a gift from a friend or rescue a plant someone has cruelly ripped from a planter and then thrown on the sidewalk - the bulk of my house plants are one or the other - I have to think long and hard about where to put it so it can get the most (or the least) amount of light. I have to hope the plant doesn't mind being watered only once a week or that in winter there will be a lot of dry heat and not a lot of moisture.

One of those plants is an orchid I thought I had killed because I uprooted it when it didn't have to be uprooted, cut back what I later realized was a lot of its root system and then fed it at the wrong time. Somehow that plant has survived, and this year is the second straight it will flower.

Last week, I wrote about the mistreatment of my peppers and my cannas. The cannas saddened me in particular because I knew better. I knew that if you took a tropical plant and put it on a porch where it can get down to the single digits overnight, it is not going to be happy. What I didn't realize was putting a plastic sheet or two and a blanket over the pot would keep in moisture on a plant that was supposed to be allowed to dry out.

I moved the pots indoors, into a sunny part of the one room where I can place all my house plants, and hoped for the best.

Two of the five pieces of growing canna, April 2016 (Margo D. Beller)

Well, when I wrote about them last week I thought they were dead. And then one evening I looked into one of the pots and saw two signs of life! Two little bits of green poking out of the pot, which was solidly packed with roots and corms. A few days later, I pulled the pots onto a tarp on my enclosed porch and started poking around -- which meant dumping the solid clump from the pot, using a saw to cut into it and then a spade to pull the sections apart.

I found five growing pieces of canna. I had planned to divide what was in the pot this spring anyway and so filled the pot with soil and put in the five pieces so they would have plenty of room to stretch out and grow. Cannas can get pretty big and after a few years they grow into each other to create a solid mass.

I looked very carefully at what I turned out of the other pot but saw nothing growing.

Now, it is always possible there will be growth in what I'm composting. My keeping it in the deep freeze might've put the plant into a deeper hybernation than I realized. If that is the case, when I put it all in the compost pile I won't be surprised if I see a mass of large, green canna leaves growing, which I can then either pull up and plant elsewhere or leave alone, a kind of zombie canna graveyard.

Why do I mention all this?

First, because I am relieved I am not a plant killer.  Second, because once again, Nature will take care of itself if Man (or me) doesn't mess around with it.

Most times people buy plants, keep them for a while and then throw them in the trash. This is a waste of your money, the plant grower's time and the compostable material in the plant.

When I take care of my plants, when I keep them going far beyond what the label says (and that includes "annuals" I've kept going for years), I am taking my stand against being part of a disposable society that doesn't think twice about putting in the garbage furniture, bicycles, plants or other things that can be donated to others for repair and resale or gifting.

My front room is full of life, and it is another thing that gives me a reason to live.

Nuclear Death Row

I wrote this after waking from a terrifying dream. It has little do with birding per se but a lot to do with the world, which is why I posted it on LinkedIn and am reprinting it here because, well, it's mine anyway.

Last night I had a strange dream. It was inspired by the recent massacre in Paris, the revelation a bomb strong enough to blow a passenger jet out of the sky could fit in a soda can, and what I read in a 20-year-old essay by evolutionary biologist and prolific columnist (for Natural History magazine and others) Stephen Jay Gould.

In my dream, my husband and I were vacationing on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts - as we were recently. Somewhere in the world terrorists (let’s call them the Islamic State, which goes under a variety of names but here I’ll call it ISIL) detonated an atomic bomb powerful enough to obliterate the target and thrown enough debris into the sky to blacken it.

This toxic cloud was pushed east quickly on the prevailing winds. In each nation the ensuing darkness and the chemicals started killing people in huge numbers.

Being on one of the easternmost parts of the United States, I watched the reports of the inevitable death coming and felt helpless, as though I was on Death Row.

Worse, as the news reports continued nonstop, mayhem ensued.

Who cares about deadlines when we’re all gonna die anyway? Who cares about rule of law? Who cares about money? Just smash a window, take what you want. You don’t like that black guy? Forget social media, get a gun and shoot him. Blow up the mosques. Hang the Jews. Who cares?

Americans rampaged in the streets. And there was nothing the President of the United States, the politicians agitating to replace him, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the New York City police department or anyone else could do about it. Death was coming. This is when I woke up.

Where does Stephen Jay Gould come in?

I am reading his 1995 collection of essays, “Dinosaur in a Haystack.” One includes a 1994 account of the comet that hit Jupiter ago, creating huge craters and throwing up thick clouds of the gases from within that quickly encircled the planet. Gould ties these events to the then-radical theory dinosaurs were obliterated from the face of the Earth by a huge asteroid that hit the planet, blackening the skies.

Gould even asked the main author of this theory, Luis Alvarez (who won a Nobel Prize for physics and worked on the atomic bomb), how that could happen. He was told, and I quote from the book, “a bolide six miles in diameter would strike the earth with ten thousand times the megatonnage of all the earth’s nuclear weapons combined.”

That must’ve been some comet. The comet fragment that exploded 28,000 feet above Siberia in 1908, known as the Tunguska event, flattened 1,000 square miles of forest, Gould wrote. Luckily, it was in an unpopulated area.

The A-bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 did hit populated areas, causing death and destruction. The bombs ended that part of World War II but started the Nuclear Age.  We’re still dealing with the fallout 70 years later.

Could a terrorist group create an mega-ton A-bomb in a can? Maybe not now. But what if the geniuses who shrunk a computer to fit in a wristwatch were paid enough to develop one?

Politicians in both U.S. parties have no problem screaming for nuclear devastation of ISIL. “Bomb them back into the Stone Age” is a common theme in social media. Bombing civilian women and children along with the terrorist cells doesn’t seem to be a problem. “Nuke them all!” one normally rational friend said of al-Queda and all Muslims after the 9/11 bombings in 2001.

Gould died of cancer in 2002. He lived to see the change of decade, millennium and the making of war that could put all of us on nuclear Death Row at a moment’s notice. Nations don’t make war anymore, people - with the ideology, followers and especially the money and technology - do. Can they be stopped? I don’t know but the prognosis isn’t good.

In 1950, the folk singer Ed McCurdy wrote “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” a pro-peace song in which the world’s leaders came together and agreed to “put an end to war.”

A nice sentiment, but my strange dream shows nothing has changed.

The Not-So-Lonely Ocean

One of the nice things about environmental preservation is that after being hunted nearly to extinction in American waters, whales are coming back in numbers and are an important source of tourist income in such former fishing locales as Gloucester, Boston and Cape Cod in Massachusetts and various coastal towns throughout New England and elsewhere.

Wilson's storm petrel (Margo D. Beller)

When my husband (MH) and I went on vacation to Massachusetts and New Hampshire this year, a whale watch was not uppermost in my mind for the itinerary. I did want to go to Gloucester again because since the last time many years ago I had read Mark Kurlansky's book about the town and another book about Clarence Birdseye, who lived in Gloucester for a time.

I had been looking at the Massachusetts bird report to see if anything would be at Great Meadows refuge near Concord, Mass., when I mentioned all the birds seen off Cape Cod and reported to the list. It was MH who then suggested the whale watch.

When we had last gone on a whale watch, out of Provincetown at the very end of Cape Cod, we never got out of the bay because there were so many whales - mainly humpbacks - hanging around, going after the fish they have to eat in bulk to survive. I, who had wanted to go far offshore to see the pelagic birds one doesn't see even off the coast, enjoyed the whales but was disappointed nonetheless. (Didn't help the so-called naturalist wouldn't confirm the kittiwakes I know I saw.)

Humpback whale and storm petrel (RE Berg-Andersson)

This time, however, we got 25 miles away from the coast to an area that was once a prime habitat for cod - the subject of another Kurlansky book I've read - called Stellwagen Bank. When overfishing threatened, the fishermen were over-regulated as to what to take, how much and how often. The fish population has been slowly coming back and, in the process, so have the bigger underwater predators such as whales.

2 sooty shearwaters with greater shearwaters (Margo D. Beller)

On a hot day in Gloucester we were soon refreshed by cold, damp breezes in the hour it took us to get out to the area where whales had been seen. I was not surprised to see double-crested cormorants off shore but I was surprised to see greater black-backed gulls much farther out into the open waters of the Gulf of Maine. About halfway out to Stellwagen, a minke whale - looking like a larger, black dolphin - came up and then swam back down. The captain said we don't follow these because they are easily spooked. Our time was limited.

As we continued on I scanned the waters and soon saw what looked like a black swallow with a white tail band. When I got a closer look it was what the naturalist later said was the most prolific bird in the world, the Wilson's storm petrel. This was a new bird for me. One of the crew had told the captain about my interest in birds and he was nice enough to confirm it, and also call out the assorted shearwaters - very large birds that look like duller-colored gulls but with larger, hooked bills - we saw: greaters, Cory's and, in lesser numbers, sootys.

Greater shearwater (RE Berg-Anderson)

These birds feed and rest on the open waters, rarely coming to land except for a very short period of mating, nesting and brooding young. Then it's back to the distant waters.

There are many other types of pelagic birds out there, but aside from a northern gannett and a pomarine jaeger called out by the captain (another new bird for me), the shearwaters and storm petrels dominated.

Until we got to the whales.

We found two humpbacked whales, the second largest in the world (after the blue), just lying there, a process known as "logging" (as in, lying there like a bump on a log). Humpbacks are naturally buoyant so when they want to dive, they pick up their heads, give themselves a push down and up come the tails - to the oohs and ahs of those watching.

Whale sighting boats (RE Berg-Andersson)

At this point there was a boat from another Gloucester company in radio contact with our captain, and they were also looking at humpbacks. After a long visit with our two - recognized by the naturalist by the distinctive markings on the underside of the tail - we switched places with the other crew and watched two more. (Eventually a boat from Gloucester's third company arrived.) All told we saw 7 humpbacks and 3 minkes, which is pretty good considering people I talked with later were lucky to have only seen one whale.

There's a lot of water out there and whales are still a protected species. In many areas outside the U.S., they are still hunted despite electricity taking the place of whale oil. In the U.S., whaling has been relegated to coastal museums catering to the tourists and the most famous account of whaling, "Moby-Dick."

We learned a lot about whales on this trip (this was a much better naturalist than the Cape Cod one) and even tho' I saw birds I've never seen before and will likely never see again, the whales were the stars of this show.

Rightfully so.

(Margo D. Beller)

You Can Go Home Again

Osprey pair, Marine Park, Brooklyn (RE Berg-Andersson)

When I was growing up along the southern coast of Brooklyn, I knew Sheepshead Bay, which gave my neighborhood its name, but did not know my junior high school was named for Shell Bank Creek, which flows to the north of Plumb Island and east into where Gerritsen and Mill creeks merge, in turn flowing into Plumb Beach Channel and on to Rockaway Inlet and, eventually, to the Atlantic Ocean.

I knew there was a neighborhood called Mill Basin and one called Gerritsen Beach and the little beach off the Belt Parkway I could walk to from my house was Plumb Beach. But the waterways for which they are named meant nothing to me. My family didn't boat and didn't fish.

When we went to Plumb Beach or occasionally Gerritsen Beach, we had to watch for trash (or worse) in the sand and in the water when we walked to the edge. We never swam and no one ever kept the fish they caught in Sheepshead Bay.

Fast-forward over 40 years. The federal government took over the waterways and beaches stretching from New Jersey's Sandy Hook through Staten Island, hooking east to Brooklyn (including the former military base, Floyd Bennett Field), Queens' Jamaica Bay and the western-most parts of the Rockaway Peninsula to create the Gateway National Recreation Area in 1972. Gateway, according to its website, is a "complex urban park, preserving 27,000 acres of land and sea across two states and three New York City boroughs."

This is when the cleanup began as well as recognition that these inlets, bays and creeks are what make this area of New York City unique. The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time of environmental activism, when people worried about the effects of polluted air and water on their children, their communities and themselves.

The federal government stepped in it because it was expected to -- a far cry from today when the idea of any federal government program enacted for the public good draws outcry from some areas and is considered a foreign and dangerous concept akin to socialism.

I left Brooklyn for college in the early 1970s, and did not spend much time visiting the beaches when I would return for visits. It has only been in the last 15 years, when my husband and I, while living in New Jersey, became interested in watching birds, did we start visiting some of these areas, which had become prime birding sites thanks to cleaner beaches and water.

Marine Park salt marsh (RE Berg-Andersson)

For instance, I had been reading about a Marine Park Salt Marsh area and some of the interesting birds found there, but I was having a hard time visualizing it. I knew Marine Park - I would ride there, alone, no mobile phone or pager, no child-safety helmet - on my bike, go around the paved, circular drive a few times and then either come home or visit my grandmother in nearby Flatlands. The area across the road was dark, dense with trees and covered in garbage. You didn't go in there. How could this be a salt marsh?

Well, the area was opened up and there was the marsh, where it had been all along. An educational center was built to explain the marsh's importance. Best of all, a paved path takes you along the marsh itself, which is the end of Gerritsen Creek. At one point, we could see where the end of Mill Creek starts (at the back of the Marine Park golf course on Flatbush Ave.). In the distance one way is the  Gil Hodges Bridge to the Rockaway Peninsula. The other way stands the reminder of 9/11 known variously as the Freedom Tower, One World Trade Center or That Ugly Building Over There.

Thanks to federal spending on Gateway, I have learned about the forts that defended New York harbor, seen hundreds of different types of  birds and visited an airfield that is now a wildlife habitat.

Had I been a birder as a child, I would not have seen the osprey, green herons, black-crowned night-heron, great and snowy egrets and other marsh and shore birds I witnessed at the Marine Park Salt Marsh.

Great egret and smaller snowy egrets (RE Berg-Andersson)

It's too bad my parents weren't inclined to have a boat and ply the waters so near our home to such exotically named places as Dead Horse Bay, Island Channel and the Raunt. Then again, what would I have seen in those dark, unenlightened times?

We didn't know what we had back then. We do now.

At a time when the Obama administration wants to broaden environmental protection and cut back on the forces that promote global warming, opposition in Congress and some states wants to bring things back to the way things were, when water was polluted, the air was brown and bins of coal dust were out for the garbage men to dump. (I saw these bins because coal was used to heat my public school, across the street from my home.)

Those people who think any rules that impinge on their ability to deplete the land of birds, animals and fish or pollute the air we all breathe or do whatever the hell they want without "government on our backs" don't know what we have either.

Faith in a Tree

I write this on the first day of spring, according to the calendar. To meteorologists, "spring" started March 1. Today, March 20, at 7:45pm, will be the vernal equinox, when the sun is over the equator. After this, the Earth will tilt in such a way that the northern hemisphere will get more light and move into summer.

But as I write it is cold and cloudy and snow - a lot of snow - is expected. In fact, at this very moment it IS snowing.

It is a depressing thing. The early flowers - snowdrops and crocus - are open, the daffodils and iris are showing signs of life and I was able to unearth my brush pile when the last of the old snow melted. Even tho we got far less snow than last year, it was colder this winter and it made the snow hard and dreary to look at. I was glad to see it melt away. Now it is back.

MH and last year's snow (Margo D. Beller)

The birds, spurred by the increasing daylight, have been singing. A song sparrow nearby is particularly persistent, as are cardinals, titmice, chickadees and house finches. Woodpeckers have been drumming and calling. In a month, the winter birds - juncos and white-throated sparrows - will be leaving and the summer dwellers and migrants will be passing through New Jersey. I've already seen early birds including brown creeper and gold-crowned kinglet, and skeins of Canada geese have been flying north, sometimes in very stiff March winds.

Spring will come, but right now it is dreary and it is snowing.

I try to find things to lift my spirits. One was on a small hill along one of the roads heading into the Central Park of Morris County, which I still call by its old name, Greystone, from its time as state land surrounding a mental hospital.

The snow was piled heavy on this hillside and it was very cold. But the sun was rising and I saw this little conifer above the snow. Somehow, despite all the deer tracks up and down the hill, this conifer - I can't get close enough to determine what type - wasn't eaten to death. It struck me as a hopeful sign, that despite the long, cold winter, spring would come again and things would grow.

Conifer emerging (2015) Cellphone picture by Margo D. Beller

A few days ago I was walking the same road and now all the snow is gone. The tree is still there, still growing, still untouched by deer. It blended into the hillside so well it really doesn't show up in my cellphone picture, as the winter scene does. I hope the tree survives and becomes very tall, somehow elbowing the oaks and maples aside to get enough lift to reach its full height.

Henry David Thoreau wrote about seeds in a book compiled and published after his death called "Faith in a Seed." In the case of this small tree, something - a squirrel, chipmunk or bird, most likely - picked a seed out of a cone and either planted it or excreted it on this spot, which just happened to have favorable conditions for growing.

What makes this tree so interesting is there are no conifers anywhere around that area. The closest ones - hemlocks, a couple of white pines and larches - are farther along the street. Or perhaps a seed was blown in from the wooded areas on the other side of the road, beyond the brook? Somehow, that seed made it to the right spot and is fighting to stay alive.

So am I. At least, I hope this is the right spot and I hope to survive. It isn't easy in this life.

The Passaic River at Scherman Hoffman (2014), some distance from where David Bird was found. 

(Margo D. Beller)

Fourteen months ago, a man about my age and with whom I had a tangential connection through work, went out for a walk and didn't come back. He lived near the Great Swamp, and by a strange coincidence I was hiking through there the day after he went missing. A woman drove up and handed me a flyer about him. It was later I realized why the name - David Bird - seemed so familiar. How ironic, considering I was out birding.

His jacket was sighted by two men in canoes on the Passaic River, the same Passaic that separates Morris and Somerset counties and runs through another of my favorite birding locales, New Jersey Audubon's Scherman Hoffman sanctuary. Bird's remains were found later and identified through dental records.

A long time ago, in Boston, I interviewed a man from what used to be the Metropolitan District Commission, which, among other things, policed the Charles River. The Charles has been known to freeze hard in winter, and people walk across it. But ice is hard to judge and when it thins people drown. The man told me that every spring his people would go out to find "floaters" - drowned bodies that float to the surface after the ice melts and they lose weight through decomposition.

It took 14 months for Bird's body to float to the surface, more time than usual. If not for his red jacket he might never have been found.

MH worries something like that will happen to me when I go birding alone. I reassure him that when I go alone I go to familiar places and stay on the trail.

But really, how safe are we nowadays in this world? We are all like that little tree, placed by chance upon this Earth, our existence dependent on outside factors beyond our control.