Let's Talk About Birds! A Letter From Today's Guest Editor
Have you ever heard of the Red Junglefowl? Most likely not. It's a medium-size tropical bird that lives in Southeast Asia. Males have a big flashy tail, a bright red comb on their head, and they like to strut their stuff. Females, as is typical in the bird world, are way more drab, lacking the comb and colorful plumage of the male. If that description sounds at least a little familiar, it should—the Red Junglefowl is the wild ancestor of the modern chicken. Now there's a bird everyone knows.
Here's another one: the Bald Eagle. Pretty sure most people would recognize that bird. The folks at White Oak Farms, featured in one of our Audubon stories we chose for today, definitely do. A few years ago, the opportunistic raptors started showing up to snack on the Georgia farm's pasture-raised chickens. Since then, dozens of the birds have begun appearing at White Oak each winter to feast on what has essentially become an endless buffet of chickens. The situation presents a real quandary for the farmers, but it's a pretty good deal for the eagles.
Of course, what has become a burden for White Oak also symbolizes a huge conservation success story. By the mid-20th century, Bald Eagle populations in the United States had been decimated. The main culprit was DDT, a pesticide that causes eagle and other birds' eggs to develop weak shells, not to mention also cause cancer in people. Thank goodness for the Environmental Protection Agency. In 1972, the agency banned the pesticide, and within a matter of decades Bald Eagle populations began to recover. Now they're plentiful enough to be terrorizing farmers and even Osprey nests. Such success is just one reason why having a strong EPA—and Endangered Species Act, for that matter—is vital.
When most people think of Audubon, they typically think of birding. We definitely do plenty of that, but conservation has always been at the heart of our organization, and it remains a pivotal part of what we do today. Our very founding was tied closely to saving the Great Egret and other waterbirds popular for their plumes from near extinction at the turn of the 20th century—the bird has also rebounded, as shown in this bioGraphic feature we included today—and as such, an egret adorns our logo as a reminder of our mission: to not just celebrate and appreciate birds, but to preserve them and the places they live as well.
Our namesake, John James Audubon, that handsome devil to your left (sorry if you thought that was me) and a leading ornithologist and environmentalist during his time, once said, "A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children." That's a good quote, and despite needing some pronoun updating, is more relevant now than ever. You'll see several stories in today's takeover mix about climate change and its impact on the world. In fact, Audubon's climate modeling shows that 314 North American bird species are threatened by climate change this century. That's a scary number, and one reason we recently launched our Plants for Birds program, which aims, among other things, to provide natural habitat for species as they relocate to more suitable climates. You should check it out.
You should also check out all of the other fantastic stories and videos we carefully selected for this takeover. We had a lot of fun making these picks, and we hope you'll find the variety entertaining and informative. You can lose yourself in our ASME-nominated feature story about a quest to Cuba in search of the possibly extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Or you can just laugh at a quick clip of an American Woodcock getting its groove on. There are goggle-wearing parrots, lessons on learning owl calls, and even a blood-soaked celebration of vultures.
In the end, what we hope you take away from Audubon's Digg takeover is simple: that birds and the habitats they live in are an awesome and integral part of this world, and to paraphrase JJA, we owe it to future generations to protect it all.
Special thanks to associate editors Hannah Waters and Purbita Saha, editorial fellow Meghan Bartels, and editorial intern Meg Callaghan for their time and effort on this project.
