April 15, 2010
Yes, that’s right. It’s a dust bowl. Sure, it resembles a verdant field backed by an orchard in bloom, but according to the California Farm Water Coalition, it’s a dust bowl. I took this photograph last month on I-5, heading back to Los Angeles from San Francisco. The whole trip via highways 101-152-5 was a Springtime Wonderland. Each of these signs was backed by acres of green. All of the fruit trees were in bloom, except for the orange trees, they’re already producing fruit. There were free-range, grass-fed sheep and cattle grazing all over the place. The California Farm Water Coalition posted these signs to raise awareness of the fact that California State Congress had cut them off. Having been in a drought for the past few years, and accustomed to heavily subsidized water, California farms had been wasting too much of what little water the Sacramento Delta had to spare.
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March 17, 2010
Myotis myotis – greater mouse-eared bat (Manuel Werner)
First discovered in bats in New York State back in 2006, white-nose syndrome has since spread to nine states and threatens to wipe out up to a third, possibly more, of North American brown bats (Myotis lucifugus). As the news of this ecological catastrophe-in-the-making spread across the pond, European zoologists and ecologist braced themselves for the arrival of the fungus in their native bat populations.
Sure enough, in March of last year, European researchers spotted a mouse-eared bat (Myotis myotis) with the white-nose fungus. But to nearly everyone’s surprise, the bat did not succumb to the disease. In fact, so far, most of Europe’s bat species remain largely unaffected by the fungus, and those that do contract the syndrome, are not dieing from it.
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