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1 month ago | 
blog.nature.org | Jenny Rogers |Emli Bendixen |Justine E Hausheer |Matthew Miller
When Rob Cunningham was growing up in Norfolk, England, he would sometimes go fishing with a friend on the banks of a river where the water was crystal clear. “I was a rubbish fisherman,” he says. “I never really caught any, but I’d see loads of trout.” The spot on the River Wensum was idyllic, he says, with strands of water-crowfoot—a kind of ranunculus—blooming on the water’s surface.
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2 months ago | 
blog.nature.org | Jenny Rogers |Justine E Hausheer |Mary Terra-Berns |Matthew Miller
Ian Biazzo, then a University of Central Florida PhD candidate, was working on a controlled burn at The Nature Conservancy’s Tiger Creek Preserve in Florida when he noticed a single frog hop off a palmetto bush and land in a pile of ash. The fire was burning low and slow, and he watched as a few animals, like the frog, dispersed.
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
blog.nature.org | Jenny Rogers |Cara Byington |Justine E Hausheer |Matthew Miller
In June, photographer Ciril Jazbec traveled from his native Slovenia to the Peruvian Andes for a high-altitude endeavor: He had been assigned to photograph local communities’ efforts to restore “amunas,” a kind of ancient water-saving canal dug in the mountainsides high above sea level for a story in Nature Conservancy magazine.
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
blog.nature.org | Jenny Rogers |Justine E Hausheer |Matthew Miller
Nearly all migratory birds migrate first, then nest once they arrive where they’re going. To do otherwise would be counter-intuitive, a process requiring a tremendous amount of energy all at once. But the American woodcock—a migratory shorebird found in the eastern United States—may do just that. Known as itinerant breeding, it’s a behavior so rare only about 10 birds, including the woodcock, are believed to practice it. For the first time, a research team has found direct evidence of it.
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Aug 11, 2024 | 
blog.nature.org | Jenny Rogers |Justine E Hausheer |Matthew Miller |Kim Carlson
On one of photographer David Walter Banks’ first trips to photograph Georgia’s Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, he awoke in the middle of the night to a bellowing outside his tent. Convinced it was an alligator sitting just on the other side of the tent flap, he did the only thing he could think to do in the moment: He bellowed back. “I just yelled at the top of my lungs,” he says.
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Aug 11, 2024 | 
blog.nature.org | Jenny Rogers |Justine E Hausheer |Christine Peterson |Kim Carlson
Philip Souza is eavesdropping on oyster reefs. The University of Texas Marine Science Institute PhD candidate is part of a team at Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve studying the sounds of oyster reefs on the Texas Gulf Coast. The state’s oyster reefs were once extensive, offering some measure of protection against shoreline erosion and providing habitat for numerous animals. But overharvesting and other factors has left reefs only a fragment of what they once were.
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May 12, 2024 | 
blog.nature.org | Jenny Rogers |Cara Byington |Justine E Hausheer |Lauren Pharr
Late in the summer of 2023, New York City-based photographer Michael George traveled to a remote finger of land jutting off of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula out into Lake Superior. The land, known as the Keweenaw Peninsula, formed as lava poured out of a rift in the Earth 1.1 billion years ago—the same geologic shift that resulted in the deep basin now known as Lake Superior.
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May 12, 2024 | 
blog.nature.org | Jenny Rogers |Justine E Hausheer |Kris Millgate |Matthew Miller
On the Hawaiian Islands, a diverse group of native forest birds found nowhere else on earth, known as honeycreepers, is struggling. Members of the finch family, the birds are deeply significant in Hawaiian culture. But, with less than half of Hawai‘i’s native forest remaining, the birds are threatened by habitat loss and, critically, a fatal avian malaria that is spreading to higher elevations as climate change brings warming temperatures.
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May 12, 2024 | 
blog.nature.org | Jenny Rogers |Cara Byington |Justine E Hausheer |Robert Annis
The first thing that hits me is the stench of something rotten—or more likely rotting—beneath my feet. The second is the sound of my shoes squelching in the soft mud as I try to take another step. No luck. I’m up to my shins in the thick, smelly muck of a tidal salt marsh. The team of scientists I’ve been trailing—led by University of Houston biologist Steve Pennings—is now far ahead of me rustling through the waist-high grasses on this tiny island near the mouth of Georgia’s mighty Altamaha River.
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Apr 15, 2024 | 
blog.nature.org | Jenny Rogers |Justine E Hausheer |Matthew Miller
It feels a bit like a cosmic joke. Standing on a hillside in North Texas among a crowd gathered from near and far, I look up at the sky—covered completely with gray clouds—searching in vain for a glimpse of the sun. It’s an unusual predicament here in North Texas. In the heat of the summer or the hours before a gathering storm—our current situation—you normally look for shelter.
